The same painting. Two encounters, separated by thirteen years. Can inspiration, given enough distance, take shape from fear itself?
When I was eight years old, my biggest enemy was a painting hung in the corridor of my grandparents’ home in Rajasthan, India.
Each summer that I visited my grandparents’ home, I was afraid of the way children are afraid of things they have no language for. It was not a fear you can point and name but one that lives in the body, in the particular dread of the hallway, in the specific silence of a room you have to pass through to get anywhere else. The painting was hung in the midway between the bathroom and my grandparents' room, which in a child’s perception of the house’s geography is the worst possible location for anything frightening. Some nights, I would close my eyes to avoid making eye contact with that ghastly painting.
It consisted of strangers eating food I couldn’t quite pinpoint, lit by a low-hanging lamp that seemed to give off less light than it withheld. Four faces – maybe even five, I was never sure, because I never let myself look long enough to count. The strangers were crowded so close around that table that the painting seemed less like a window into a room and more like a room collapsing in on itself. The walls leaning in, pressing down from above like something with ominous weight. I remember the hands most. Thick, working hands, reaching towards a dish at the centre. Something about the heaviness of those hands against the thinness of the light frightened me more than anything else in the frame. I told my grandparents I couldn’t sleep. I told them that I saw the painting when I closed my eyes.
Eventually, out of what I now recognise as pure grandparental mercy, they took it down from the hallway and carried it into the basement, where, as far as I knew for the next thirteen years, it never saw daylight again. It became a lacklustre piece of wood I was not allowed to think about. A problem solved by the darkness and the no visitation rule of the basement.
We don’t think of fear as a room a painting can build around you. We think of inspiration, if we think about it at all, as the opposite kind of event entirely. Sudden, generous, arriving from outside. The common image is almost sacred. It is a bolt from elsewhere, a muse descending, a stranger walking into your life and rearranging the furniture of your mind in a single visit. Inspiration, in this popular telling, is something that happens to you cleanly. In one direction, and it happens to people who are in some sense ready for it. They appear to be standing in the right field at the right moment when the lightning comes down. It’s a flattering story, mostly. Because it makes inspiration feel like luck or grace rather than work. But it’s also a story that has very little to say about people like me, who spent over a decade being afraid of a piece of art before that same art quietly, almost embarrassingly, became one of the formative inspirational experiences of my adult life.
If inspiration only strikes once, cleanly, from outside, then what do you call the second time something hits you? When it isn’t new at all, when you’ve been carrying a version of it in your chest since you were eight years old?
