What is not intended can sometimes be the gift you are looking for. - 'The gentle Accident.' -=

 

I used this piece of canvas as a palette for my watercolor painting, and after a while it turned out to be this piece of watercolor painting, which I highly doubt I can create such similar work. In the Zen art tradition this is what is known as a 'Gentle Accident'.  I am presently back working on my 100 feet long painting of the Penang, Georgetown area, which I started sometime in 2008. The paper was given to me by the then Dean of Students for the Fine Arts Department at the University of Science Malaysia, {USM. Prof. Najib Dawa left his post to become the Director of the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur. He told me that he got the paper from England and does not know what to do with it, and so I was asked to paint on it whatever i wanted. For the past years, I have had three solo exhibitions with a 100-foot-long painting in Penang. It is never finished as I keep working on it whenever it moves me to do so. 

It is no easy task to fill up a one hundred feet by three feet long piece of paper, and I know I am not doing justice to it, given the time it has taken to come near to completion. However, it has been shared by many art students and the general public, and this is my intention in the beginning. My work is ongoing, and it will be completed when someone puts a price on it and it is no more mine. The theme is to capture the essence of what Georgetown was then and what is becoming of it today. It is also to share the closely knitted life of the people of the multi-racial and religious group that dwells in this city. Georgetown is where I was born in 1949, seventy-four years ago, and I have seen the many changes that have taken place in and around the City. On the thirty-first of August, Malaysians will celebrate the National Day, where the country was able to free itself from British colonial rule without firing a bullet in 1957. I was there along with thousands of the citizens of the City celebrating the declaration of Independence at the Padang Kota Lama field near where Fort Cornwallis is located.

I worked on the painting whenever and wherever I could over the years, and this was my work at the Museum gallery, Tuanku Fauziah, a few years back. It is hard on the lower back if you ask me, but it is still one of my meditative forms of practice.

The Convent Green Lane Girls School was asked to line up and hold up the painting on their school field on Independence Day a few years back.  The problem with the painting is how to install it in an exhibition.

I have the feeling that this painting will only be done when I am done for or when I take my step into the beyond, and what will happen to it will be up to my children. It is something I hope to leave behind for them as I have nothing much to leave as my legacy if not financial inheritance. If they can sell it, much power to them. As it is I have got my small gift in the form of the gentle accident that happened on the small canvas I had used as a pallet while working on it today.  

Alhamdullilah!