Local Art

Last night I attended the Newport Beach Film Festival. Among the screenings was a documentary about an Indian woman named Sonabai Rajawar, who became a bride through an arranged marriage around 1960. During the next 15 years, her husband inexplicably kept her isolated in their remote home--a confinement that was very unusual because Indian women are typically well-connected socially to other families, especially women. But during those 15 years Sonabai created an entirely new form of art in which she used mud, straw, and bright paint to sculpt beautiful images of people and animals--often happy and whimsical depictions--to decorate her home. Sonabai's way of coping with her severely limited circumstances was to work the material available within the confines of her living space, time, and skill. What's amazing is that she worked this restricted medium to create many beautiful things, and spawned a new movement in Indian art. Like Sonabai, we are set in personal worlds bound by specific times, locations, resources, and skills. For us, too, the creation of something beautiful and uniquely our own are within the bounds of possibility.