An escape from expectation

Painted by me on canvas with acrylic color .

Before I started painting it, I had no idea how would it turn out. Actually, I gave the white-blank canvas to my three years old son to keep him busy. He took the brush and started filling it out with the colors he liked. I blocked the boundaries using an adhesive plastic tape with the hope that whatever color he strikes — after finishing when we pull off the tape it would look like ‘professional’ abstract painting because of its nice rectangular boundary!

After few strokes, my son lost his interest and started playing with his other toys. I looked at the wet canvas mostly filled up with green color. The unfinished painting instigated something inside me. Using the leftover color palettes, after some random strokes I started painting. At some point, I started to see a pattern. It looked like a somewhat dolphin-like creature swimming in the ocean.

The pattern that I noticed was very vague, another person would have imagined something else. But I wanted to bring the dolphins. It wasn’t anything like painting. It was more like discovery. I discovered three dolphins-like creatures swimming in a dream-like ocean!

I was never trained as an artist. But I always liked to draw, paint or, play with colors. I wondered,- ‘why did I like it?’. The answer did not come to me immediately. I think it is probably the fact that the act of painting creates a mental state for me and time flies without notice. I never claim an artisanship; it was rather a newly discovered meditation for me – an escape from expectations.