‘Everyone can draw,’ feel artist-couple Blaise Joseph and Artreyee Day. They should know. Trained at MS University, Baroda, they work with rural and urban communities to incorporate art in educational projects.
“As a Jesuit, I toured rural areas for 15 years, and along the way, I became an artist,” he says. Artreyee had been illustrating, writing and initiating art education. They’ve been working together since 2012, producing community-written and illustrated material for people in little-known rural areas.
They are artist-consultants for grassroots organisations that work in tribal and rural areas, government schools, educational institutions, orphanages, correctional homes and research organisations. They also work along inter-state border areas. “In a project very dear to us, we produced a series of multi-lingual reading books for primary school children in the Araku-Koraput region on the Andhra-Odisha border,” they say. They gathered personal and traditional stories and songs from elders, teachers, field-staff and local youth, through a series of workshops; decoded the babel of Odiya, Telugu and six tribal dialects, and encouraged the people to illustrate charts and books. “The result was a rich visual narration.” They’ve done a similar book series with a group from Chhattisgarh. “Blaise loved getting the Musahar community girls of the Prerna Hostel in Patna to paint their bus with murals based on oral traditions and mythology.”
It’s all about introducing local ethos into classrooms through painting and story-telling, but this expands to include entire village communities. The artists feel that having an art experience is our birthright. In their workshops, participants indulge in individual and group exercises. Blaise and Artreyee do not have a rigid plan; the material they finalise on springs out of these common exercises. Participants ‘regain self-worth, inner freedom and the joy of discovering their creativity’.
Learning does not happen in schools alone. So teachers, parents and other members are called in to release their ‘inner child’ and create works of art in a non-judgmental, non-competitive space. They tell their stories through drawings and story-telling — tools the artists use for self-expression. “Learning through individual and collective memories is absent in our curriculum,” they feel. According to them, artists should take others along their creative quest. Setting up creative, forward-thinking art institutes for art-facilitators should be the immediate step. In the process, participants glimpse the unexplored areas of their inner worlds, artists are born constantly. Their community art gatherings create conversations between the vulnerable and the powerfulbring about heart-warming results: “A worker from Vedanta Bauxite mines in Chhattisgarh attended a workshop after a long day at the mines and painted for some time — he returned every day to paint for hours. ‘I’ve never felt so relaxed and enriched,’ he said. In Vidyanagar, Gujarat, a boy said, ‘I have discovered the treasure within me; I want to draw and draw.’ A participant used humour to illustrate his failure as a local leader. Such stories are common.”
On a grant from IFA-Bangalore Kali-Kalisu Project, they are busy introducing art practice in government schools in Karnataka. Chennai drew them with its possibility of research for coastal narratives.
“We’ve been meeting activists, educators and artists to engage with fishing communities in coastal South India. It would be good to write coastal histories as visual narratives before they vanish into modern development.” They have started collaboration dialogues with institutions in Kerala and initiatives such as Coastal Research Centre in Chennai. “People need to tell their stories; Visual narrative is a powerful tool; it can change human destiny.”
