I recently rediscovered painting, something I had not explored since I was very young. When I paint, I am allowing myself to reconnect with a familiar playfulness. I get to be a child and an adult – somehow both. I don’t mean to say that the child guides the adult or that one replaces the other. I mean that both are holding the brush, both are making strokes of colour and both step back in order to read the difference. When I am staring at a work in progress, I notice the whole as well as its parts. I strain sometimes to keep everything in balance and at other times I summon the courage to work on impulse. It is a feeling situated somewhere between memory and renewal.
I have also noticed something happen to my writing since I started painting again. Certain habits spill into one craft from the other; the way I hesitate with a canvas, for instance, and then notice my hesitation. I have always had moments in my writing when I feel that sense of hesitation over some new movement or turn in the narrative – usually when I first sit down to begin. And I have always needed to muster a kind of restlessness to pull it off. I have found I come to it easier after I have spent the morning painting. A certain creative impulse has already settled in; to begin again, every morning, with whatever creative project requires that kind of courage.
This may have something to do with the fact that I paint without an audience. I paint for myself, for my own enjoyment and nothing more. It is a freedom I can no longer experience in the same way with writing. Of course, to have an audience at all, any kind of readership, is an immense privilege. But maintaining a side of my creative life that is entirely anonymous allows me to fully extend, to make bold strokes and many mistakes. The deepest pleasure in any creative project, at least for me, comes from striving to create something new. Painting gives me the courage to write towards experimentation; it reminds me to take chances and just begin.
In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne is out now
This story of change was published in the G2 special issue A new start on 31 December
