The elephant--Mayank Chhaya
A few days ago, I made some bhajias on a whim. They turned out to be delicious but that is not the point of this post. It is about the thickened, somewhat burnt cooking oil that remained with bits of deeply fried besan droplets in it. I could have thrown the oil away in trash. For some reason though I just left it untouched in my oven along with other pans.
This morning I woke up with an epiphany. I know it is a grand word to describe something so mundane but let’s go with it. The epiphany was to prime a page of my sketchbook with that oil strained off the besan bits. That made the paper’s surface rather slick. I then used three pastels, dark blue, light blue and green to create a somewhat like a jungle foliage.
As expected, my pastels worked wonderfully on the vegetable oil-slathered paper. In the foreground, I had the idea about creating either a sleeping or dead elephant with quick broad brushstrokes in black acrylic. I did. Then I added a few blade-like marks near the head of the elephant to create some effect of grass and some flora.
The result is this quick work.
All stories do not have to have a moral but this one has—bhajias can lead to both intense acidity and creativity.