There is a particular kind of exhaustion that no one warns you about. It is not the exhaustion of doing too much. It is the exhaustion of always doing less than you know you are capable of, and knowing, with absolute clarity, exactly why.
For fifty years I have been a creator. A visual artist trained in the discipline, formed by it, living inside it even when life tried to arrange itself around everything else. And for most of those fifty years, I have been swimming upstream, against the current of institutional falling inline, priestly duty, community suspicion, administrative necessity, and the quiet, persistent pressure of people who love you but do not quite understand what it is you are trying to do. This is not a complaint. It is a reckoning.
The ancient Chinese called it as rowing against the current. If you stop, you do not stay still. You go backward. The artist who tries to create within an institution, within a vocation, within a web of obligations and relationships and hierarchies, knows this feeling with the whole body.
In my formative years itself I have done one too many smaller contributions to the world of design and art for the institution and province I am part of—a shrine with a large relief work of a serine Jesus meditating in Indian posture. St Anthony’s church Bannur, logos and designs for events and occasions, etc. being only a student and designing is a big limitation, you don't get the entire picture, you are asked to do a specific thing and you carry it out; but you don't have much say in matters—those going wild at it is impossible; you play within the box.
I thought after being a full-fledged friar and then a priest in the institution and province I hoped for room to unleash my creativity, and be accepted. After working for a couple of years in our seminary as an asst. rector and a lector for the seminarians, I went into my post graduation in M Sc Visual Communication. After my studies in visual media, I was invited to teach as part timers in two institutions in Bangalore, Christ University and Jyoti Nivas college autonomous; and eventually I became a full time faculty in Jyoti Nivas College autonomous. And yet—and here is the thing that keeps me awake—I have never once gone completely wild with what I had.
When I installed and worked on the landscape for the dancing St. Francis drawn and lazar-cut by Christopher Coelho OFM, that joyful form drawn from the Franciscan spirit of “where there is sadness, let me bring joy”, I was so full of certainty about what it would do for a house that lacked a visual identity. I talked and convinced. And still, many looked at it with quiet disapproval.
Executing a grotto to Mother Mary in Bangalore campus had its approval form the administration; space, money, and freedom of design was allowed; but trust from the community was scarce. Only when the unique design began to speak for itself and people began to talk good of it, I had some solace and peace of mind.
I did design a large stain glass work behind the altar aria of St. Anthony’s Friary parish church, Bangalore. Since it happened under the direct supervision of the parish priest, I was kept insulated from public and institutional prying.
Building an audio-video recoding studio, and communication centre, which was eventually named as TAALA studios, one of the best studios in Christian circles in Bangalore, did many big projects, had clients from the secular professional world, managed television Programmes for the archdiocese in collaboration with Doordarshan. Initiated classes in music, art, and visual media. While all these achievements happening, I was strongly aware of the shadow of disapproval, and hostility of friars to this project, which made me very cautious and slow exploring—and this is not a field where one succeeds if one treads with fear and too much caution.
I was a provincial councilor given charge, to oversee and give a kick start to a psychology college on St. Anthony’s Friary campus, Indian Institute of Psychology and Research. It was a big opportunity, so the then provincial and team grabbed the chance, and now it had to be planted into a campus, which already had many other things happening in it, and a campus which many had privileged entitlement to. We had to make use of the existing building and space as we began. I was involved in the design thinking. Spend days together in planning, genuinely thought through ways not to hurt the decorum of a seminary formation house, also avoid too temporary looking structures that would be an eyesore to those come into the campus. Used good natural stones to cover that which is ugly along the way. Build a minimalistic designed café as canteen of the college, etc. which was appreciated and marveled by many; but to my surprise, there were brothers who have never or seldom step into the café space even though they had assumed in charge of that space. There was enough space on campus, but not enough generosity and fraternity. Some stifled it as chance to win votes in the upcoming elections. Some were not happy with who gets the credit.
This is not unusual. It is, in fact, the oldest story in art. Greatness and approval rarely arrive at the same time. When I designed a grotto to Mother Mary in Bangalore, it was only when the unique design began to speak for itself—when strangers started talking—that I found some peace. The work had to earn what I could not simply ask for: trust.
Trust, I have learned, is a complicated currency in institutional life. It is not always given to the work. It is given to the politics around the work. Who proposed it, who gets the credit, whose vote it might influence. Art becomes the casualty of power games played on other fields.
I was shredded to pieces in more that one occasions in province meeting, as though I had committed a crime, for drawings I had made for a philosophy institution building and some artistic designs for the same in Kerala, the Seekers’ Café design in Bangalore IIPR campus, etc. Many of those drawings were eventually built. Some I still believe could be. But in that room, it did not matter. What mattered was that I was not the right person, at the right moment, in the right favour.
My Divided Life
The philosopher Albert Camus wrote of the absurd, the gap between what we hunger for and what the world offers. The artist in an institution lives inside a particular kind of absurdity: you are asked to create, but not given the conditions that creation actually needs. This pattern plays so much in my mind, that I could not commit to just one thing, rejecting other things—I had the hunger and talent to do some things, and I tried doing them, but at the same time I had to keep the institution satisfied with their idea of a work and contribution.
I teach in a college, but the hours that should go toward learning, research, deep practice, go instead to priestly work, rituals, administrative burden. Look at it from the other side, I am a priest — but the time that should go toward full pastoral presence goes to students, syllabi, and studio projects. I edited a magazine, and did it well, with care for both content and form, but could not fully attend to the business of keeping it income generating, for which I know the institution will point a finger at me; I have no regrets because what I did was also urgent, also real, also mine to carry out.
I got involved with a lot of things. I always thought that one feeds the other, I tell myself. Remove one and the rest becomes thinner. And there is truth in that. The artist who has lived among people, carried grief, managed systems, navigated politics, he sees more. He has material that the purely cloistered artist does not. But there is also a cost. A diffusion. A scattering of the self across too many surfaces. And art, real art, the kind that surprises even its maker, requires a terrifying kind of concentration.
The dream is that absolute wild spot. Something of what I experienced while doing the stained glass behind the altar at St. Anthony's Friary Church, done under the quiet shelter of a parish priest who trusted me enough to insulate me from the prying. To a great extant I experienced it while building a grotto to Mother Mary in Bangalore, though there were voices of disapproval, I had a fair autonomy of executing it.
Here is the question I must sit with honestly: is the “absolute magic spot of success and approval” a real possibility, or is it the artist's version of heaven? I do not want to romanticise the existential struggle. There is a difference between the productive tension of an artist living with unresolved questions and the quiet tragedy of a person who simply never got the conditions they needed. I have been swimming upstream for fifty years. I am still swimming. I am not tired of swimming. But I am tired of swimming in circles.
I believe that I have it still in me; the stuff that can create absolute magic; it is not gone. It has not been beaten out by the meetings and the mistrust and the divided years—it is there, patient, and at times, slightly impatient. Cezanne, in his last decade, walked every morning to Mont Sainte-Victoire and painted it, over and over, the same mountain. People thought he had run out of ideas. He had simply, finally, gone all in.
I think of the dancing St. Francis; I want to become that spirit which is wild and loose and free. That is what I want to be now. Not the careful thing that tries to please, but the dancing thing. Even if I walk alone; even if no committee approves it; even if the institution does not look at it, I want to give it all I have; I want to create without conditions applied.
The story of the storyteller.
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