What a piece of chalk taught me about art and life

I do not remember the first drawing I made, but I remember the material. It was a brittle, unassuming piece of chalk.

I come from a small village, Barrya near Raghogarh in Madhya Pradesh, where making art was more instinctive than learned. New sketchbooks or proper materials felt like a distant dream. What I had were fragments — pieces of chalk collected from classrooms, discarded, worn down by other hands.

With them, I made drawings on the cow-dung-coated walls of our home, trying to make sense of the world. Much like the rangoli that appears outside homes during festivals, drawn with care, only to disappear by evening or the next day.

Looking back now, I realise those chalk pieces taught me some of the most lasting lessons about art and life.

The nature of things

Chalk does not allow control in the way a pen or a brush might. It is not easy to tame, does not allow for much adjustments in pressure and flow. It crumbles, smudges, it fades with a single wipe. Even today, the dry pigments and soft pastels I work with carry that same unpredictability. 

As children, we are not afraid of the mess or the process of learning through failure.  

Where I grew up, very little could be controlled — the weather, the land, the conditions we lived in. You would learn, without being guided, how to adapt. Perhaps that is why working with such a material felt natural. Drawing with chalk was never about mastering it, but about entering into a conversation with it. 

It meant engaging in a dialogue with a world that is changing, fragile, full of friction, and defies absolute control. 

Returning to the elements

A child does not think of chalk as a material or a medium. It is just something that turns the floors and walls into something more interesting, much like the pandu, the white clay we used for the lipai of the walls – both feeling approachable, close to the land, and familiar to the touch. 

As I continued my journey as an artist, I encountered new experiences, tools, techniques, and ideas. I still find myself often returning to that earlier way of working. To allow the material and the moment to guide the process, to remain open to what emerges.  

Now, during my art residency in Leitrim County, I find myself drawn again to the elements — water, light, and the earthy tones murmuring through the ancient geological layers of Eagle’s Rock and Ben Bulben.

At places like Glencar Waterfall, located near the Sligo–Leitrim border, amid the meditative flow of the “waters and the wild,” you begin to sense how the renowned Irish poet W. B. Yeats (who first championed and promoted Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali in the West) found poetry in this landscape. Here, natural forces seem to shape a language older than form itself: a rhythm, an elemental  cadence, that one keeps returning to.

Begin anywhere

A child with a small piece of chalk does not wait for the right moment. The nearest wall, the ground, an empty corner — anywhere is enough. There is no need for preparation, no anxiety about where to begin.

Perhaps that is what stays with us, not the marks themselves, but the ease of entering into something without hesitation. Without needing clarity beforehand. Without needing to know where it will lead.

Over time, we begin to wait for certainty, for readiness, for conditions to align. And in that waiting, something essential is often lost.

To begin anywhere is to trust what is available. To work with what is at hand, to allow meaning to emerge.

In that sense, neither art nor life requires perfect conditions.

They only ask that we begin.

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