Flying colours

Divya Gordon finished her HSC last year, with art as two of her units. The oil painting she made received 100% marks and was shortlisted to be in this year’s Art Express exhibition. It is a composite work, with nine separate canvases - six of these are portraits of a woman in different angles, and three larger plain paintings - all arranged on the wall intriguingly. Divya has called the work Maina, after her mother.

Maina Gordon has been suffering from MS for some years now. An article on her (Living With MS) that appeared in Indian Link in 2007, opened the eyes of many readers to the hardships and pain, and also breakthroughs and triumphs, of being a sufferer of this disease.

Divya Gordon, Maina’s older daughter, took this into account while choosing her topic to do her HSC art project.

She says, “People have always been my favourite subject matter. I just don’t connect to still life and landscapes with the same amount of interest. Studying and copying every slope and crevice on someone’s face, is infinitely entertaining.”

The former PLC girl adds, “Rather embarrassingly, I think I found my calling when we had to sketch a nude model at school!”

Divya describes the process by which the painting took shape.

“I caught mum on a blue day and asked her to pose for me. I knew which views, angles, limbs and expressions I wanted to depict. Limited instruction was needed – she’s a natural! A copious amount of photos were taken during her daily struggles (i.e. getting out of bed and onto her chair) and then played with on the computer to experiment with angles and cropping. The final photos were then selected”.

Maina couldn’t pose in person because she can’t stay still for long, and also because Divya had to work at school.

“It took approximately 6 months from start to finish - I worked in class and at lunch times”.

Why the separate canvasses?

“I think the effect of small scale (attempted realistic) snapshots is to provide, as well as they can, a narrow window into the daily trials of Maina’s disability, through the emotive screen of blue. Originally I planned to line the 20-by20s up across the wall. But that would have been boring”.

And why blue and white?

“Reasons to why the paintings are blue and white are two-fold. One, emotive emphasis; and two, I wanted to experiment more with all the tones and shades of blue. I painted once before in these colours and liked the end result.”

The end result in this particular work, has enough mystery and intrigue, so that viewers linger over it for quite some time. Divya explains, “It is my understanding that good art tends to be mysterious - a good artist never explains their artwork in depth (unless its purpose is to convey a point, for whatever enlightening reason)”.

Divya prefers that the viewer’s “experience and understanding should be on a more sensory level, and they should identify with it by imaging up their own meaning”.

Other than that 100% mark, Divya got some positive feedback from other people who saw the artwork.

“My teacher was very happy with my effort and the end result. She wasn’t aware that I was nominated for Art Express and when I told her she said she had expected so. One of my friend’s mums who knows my mum actually cried when she saw it, but I think we can attribute that to her feeling emotional at the time”.

And Mum herself, is naturally bursting with pride, even though she was very much in pain when the photos were taken.

“When I saw the final work, I was flooded with memories of how difficult it was for me at the time Divya took those photos. The paintings were screaming with the anguish I had experienced with each movement I made. At the time Divya had taken the photos, I was recovering from a bilateral mastectomy. I felt detached from the figure in the paintings, as if I were looking back on myself. This retrospect relayed hope to me, as my recovery was emphasised by the reminder of my pain.”

Divya has always had an interest in art. She chose art as a subject for the HSC because “I loved the theoretical and practical aspects of art and was scoring high in it at the time. It was a practical and enjoyable decision. Art is a great two units as it breaks up the study during that intense time.”

And no doubt she will be doing more art in the future. We wish her all the best.

Devna Luthra