What I Failed to Capture with the Camera, I did with my Mind's Eye.

 

What I Failed to Capture with the Camera, I did with my Mind's Eye.

Last Saturday, a friend drove me to the Sedim River area in Kulim, Kedah, to visit the second home of my old friend Hasnol J. Saidon, former Director of MGTF at USM and an Associate Professor, which he has now turned into a homestay.

The occasion was an artists-in-residence gathering, bringing together five or six artists from different parts of the country. I went there expecting to see art, but I came away thinking about something else entirely:

How much of life do we fail to capture simply because we are too busy experiencing it?

Looking back, my one regret is that I did not document the event more thoroughly. I should have taken more photographs. I should have made videos. I should have recorded some of the conversations and the work being presented.

Instead, I became sidetracked.

Perhaps that is the word.

Or perhaps I was simply drawn into the people themselves.

I met and spoke with several of the participating artists and had the opportunity to learn something about what each of them was exploring through their creative work.

Shakir, an artist I had known previously, explained his experiments with creating colours from natural materials—roots, flowers and other parts of plants. There was something wonderfully elemental about the idea of returning colour to the earth from which it came.

Then there was a young Chinese artist who went by the name Forest, creating images from dried leaves. What might ordinarily be discarded as dead and useless material became part of his artistic vocabulary.

Another Chinese artist was working with watercolour, exploring her ideas about the nature of the universe through the basic elements of earth, wind, fire and water. She was also an astrologer, and her artistic explorations seemed to move naturally between the visible world and the invisible one.

It reminded me once again that artists are forever looking at the same world and somehow seeing different worlds within it.

Perhaps that is one of the great gifts of art.

It doesn't necessarily give us new things to look at.

It teaches us to look again.

What impressed me most, however, was seeing Hasnol himself continuing to devote his energy to the promotion of art among the younger generation.

There were local children from the surrounding kampung attending with their parents. They were not simply spectators. They were being brought into an environment where art could become part of their experience of growing up.

That, to me, was particularly meaningful.

Art does not have to begin inside a gallery.

It can begin in a kampung.

It can begin beside a river.

It can begin with a child sitting beside a parent, watching someone turn a dried leaf into an image or a flower into a colour.

I was told that the event was also supported by the National Art Gallery, which made the gathering even more significant as an example of bringing contemporary artistic activity beyond the usual urban centres.

And yet, strangely enough, the thing I will probably remember most about the day was not something I photographed.

Before leaving, I handed Hasnol a rough printed copy of my book.

I asked if he would consider writing the Foreword.

He willingly accepted.

There were a few minor comments and suggestions about how and what might be presented, but there was no hesitation in his response.

That meant something to me.

Hasnol is not only an artist and an academic; he is also a very perceptive writer. To have someone with his experience look at this collection of memories, sketches and stories and offer to introduce it to the reader feels like another small piece of the journey falling into place.

So perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on myself for failing to document Sedim as thoroughly as I had intended.

I did not capture everything with my camera.

But I captured something else.

I captured conversations.

I captured impressions.

I met artists.

I saw children being introduced to art.

I watched an old friend continuing to create opportunities for the next generation.

And I took one more step toward completing a book that has been following me for much of my life.

Maybe that is enough.

The camera may have missed a few things.

The memory did not.

And perhaps, in the end, that is what matters.

Wallahu Alam.

#Sedim #ArtAsJourney #WhatWeRemember #ArtistsAndLife #PassingTheTorch #WallahuAlam