Imagine a hot day, an entire family of 4, dad, mum two siblings son and daughter, in a garden, not the green landscaped kinds, just a home garden with weeds all round, mud and soil, few flowers and tall, tall mangoes tress.
I grew up gardening with my father, we were most of the times trying to control a garden that had a mind of it's own, the grass was tall, sometimes the height of an 8 year old and the flowers were wild, small but wild, I recollect sometimes the stems refused to be cut with a knife, we had to pull them out like 2 or 3 of us together, with roots scraping from the deep insides of the ground. Off-course the fact that Papa never wanted a gardener to do any of this just helped our "wild" garden flourish.
As a family, Saturdays were to weed these grass, and I recollect how Papa made an invisible line in our garden , he use to not even touch certain areas, it was like "ok this is what I can work with, beyond it it stays the forest that it is."
There were large uphill mounds inside, and when you climbed them it felt like it was a part of a forest, there were homes of snakes and mongoose, Sandalwood trees they loved to wiggle and wrap themselves in, I used to climb up these mounds also the mango trees imagining another world. It was an adventure to reach the tallest part of the tree and see the landscape from the height.
Sometimes I used the land to make temporary ponds and structures, like a world of my own. I graded and mixed leaves to create pastes I had no clue to do what with. I crossed the "safe" limits and collected the grass and flowers to add them to the home bouquet - the "task" given to me by my mum every weekend.
So I made bouquets of these wild flowers and grass, and my mum always appreciated the creativity. I did not want to shatter the nice garden flowers that Papa had sown, it made no sense, plus that was the only part of our garden that was "sane". Also we were actually in a land on the volcanic rocks so growing anything fancy was not an easy feat.
So for me flowers and trees started becoming a symbol of strength and resilience, as I saw them as wild and strong. And when I paint, all this love comes back to me, I use florals in my paintings to convey strong emotions such as hope, growth, and renewal.
In conclusion, I hardly knew why I paint these the way I do , but as I clean up the old memories I know why . Do you have any such memory of yourself that is special to you ?