Amrita

I have been researching Amrita Sher-Gil, the modernist Punjabi painter who I first learned about in 2018 via Durga Chew-Bose's affinity for her in a lecture she gave that I was attending for my job...she also talks about Sher-Gil's fashioning of her self-image in this essay on jewelry here, from the same year...yesterday I watched this video account of Sher-Gil's life made in 2007 by Navina Sundaram, Amrita's niece on hers paternal side (notice how Navina leaves the ethno-religious conjunction of Amrita's Hungarian mother's identification out of the family lore), I think it's a real testament to the slow-burning question of what does one do with the artist's "legacy", how to steward an after, how does the still-human keep hold of the mythic fire that has hollowed out the dazzling spirit's eyes?

I think this is my favorite Sher-Gil painting of the few that can be found often in low-res images online, Sleep, 1933. It is from Amrita's Paris years, and depicts her sister, Indira. I love how she's flattened the corporeal and compositional planes, and the mystical inclusion of the dragon-serpent motif that accompanies the figure through her slumber on that amazing pink throw. 

The sense one gets of Amrita from all of the available materials, in their totality (which I am only starting to plumb, I'll say that), is of a great wildish womanly fever and fervor, of intensity and commitment, and I know what that feels like in my own body. There is some arrogance, yes, in the conviction of her self-positioning but that arrogance is also familiar, it is something I like to hide, ironically it is something I let loose only among those closest to me, it is part of my big ROAR. Whereas Sher-Gil promoted herself broadly and enjoyed her sexuality broadly, however caught she was, on purpose and by external classification, in the trappings and distortions of her periodized time, contrasting from our current era of beyond-time—the earthiness (is this correct?) with which she carried herself, that Durga calls "enigmatic" but that at least to me is no mystery, is something I am considering emulating in Saturn's new turn to Pisces, which is amplifying my creative and sensual placements, and calling for my de-vaporization, into actual form. Regardless, it gives me courage, seeing her work.