Meditation on canvas: The joy of reading between Trishla Jain’s dots and dashes | India News – Times of India

You studied English literature at Stanford, and you write as well as paint. What is your favourite way of expressing yourself?
I’m most comfortable expressing myself through meditation. People would say that it’s not really a form of expression, but for me it’s the most beautiful kind of expression. That’s why I wanted to bring meditation into my life’s work, whether it’s writing or painting. The thing that inspires me is the human mind’s capacity to settle down, to have a sense of stability and peace. This is the greatest wealth or treasure I have found. After moving to America, there were some big shifts in my life — I grew up, my children were growing up and it just became so clear that life can throw you all sorts of curveballs. The only thing we can do is to stay equanimous in the storms. But achieving that is not easy. There are distractions like technology that pull us towards doing more, achieving more. How do we ground ourselves and stay true to who we are and allow the mind to stabilise itself? Meditation is where I found my sense of peace. It is the most beautiful thing anybody can have.

You talked about the pull of technology. In the art world, there’s been a lot of discussion about the use of artificial intelligence. Have you used it in your practice?
Technology can be used to make things faster, more precise, and it can reduce human effort. But by taking away all of those things, we also take away the fruit of our labour. I don’t use technology because it will take away the beauty of the process. The whole point of my art is that it’s created by hand; it has the little imperfections that a human hand brings. If it was done by a machine, it would just not be the same. It wouldn’t have the meditative quality to it.
Some of your works look almost like embroidery…
Yes, that’s because they’re so precise. Each dot and dash is like a stitch.
You started the series in 2020 when Covid-19 was dominating the headlines. Did creating art help anchor you in the pandemic?
to go deeper into this process of infusing meditation into my creative process. And because there was so much anxiety and chaos around us, it became all the more important to remind people that by simply closing their eyes, by being aware of the breath, by just taking a moment for themselves, they can really calm down.
Your new series of works are titled ‘yantra’ and ‘tantra’. They’re very different and yet they fit together, like the Chinese yin and yang principle…
The yantra works are very logical, rational, planned, a precise mathematical endeavour. And that maybe leaves out some of the reverie and dance of the tantra works, which is where you just let go of the grid, and it happens itself. So, it’s like the inhale and the exhale, the yin and the yang. They complement each other. It’s very interesting to see how at different times people are drawn to different works depending on what they need in their life. Sometimes, we need more grounding, control, and stability. Then there are times we need to let go. The series allows the viewer and the artist to have both.

Kali, a gold ink and watercolor, is one of the highlights of the tantra series
Some of the works have a centre. Is that deliberate?
Of the two series of works, the yantra works have a deliberate centre. Yantras are a geometric configuration used for meditation — people use them to still and concentrate the mind. So, the configuration with a clear centre is deliberate. It’s very symmetric. It creates a sense of harmony on the canvas. The other series of tantra works don’t have an established centre and are much more fluid. There is a sense of surrender. There’s no planning in those works. They just emerged naturally.
As an artist, your oeuvre has changed a lot. Your last solo had quite a pop aesthetic with literary allusions like Alice in Wonderland, but this is a new rabbit hole. Can you tell us about your artistic journey?
I was quite young when I had my first few shows. I don’t think I had found myself yet. The early works were quite autobiographical in nature with found objects and words forming a story of my experiences. Then I took a break of around six to seven years where I didn’t paint at all. I focused a lot on meditation, I learned to let go of stuff and figure out what was really important. At the same time, I was exposed to minimalism in America, which is about really distilling the essence. The work of Agnes Martin at the Museum of Modern Art became one of my greatest influences. When I finally decided to pick up the brush again, I didn’t want it to be about my story any more or my limited identity. I wanted to paint about what inspired me at the deepest level, something that I could paint about until the day I die. It would never grow old, it would never taint. It was about the human mind’s capacity for peace and the wisdom we’ve received through so many enlightened masters like the Buddha about how to systematically take the mind from a state of distraction and chaos to one of stability and concentration. Mindfulness of breathing was the biggest inspiration and I used it to create these works. So, I had my formal meditation sitting on the cushion. And then in the studio, there would be creative meditation. Earlier, I had a varied artistic repertoire of collage and canvas, many colours, all sorts of images, cutouts and words. This is a new, sort of grown-up version of my art with a very limited artistic repertoire. It comes from the idea of minimalism so, essentially I limit myself to horizontal and vertical lines, dots and dashes. Those are the kinds of markings I can do while being conscious of breathing. I’ve let go of impasto work. In these new works, any sense of three dimensionality comes from the use of light and dark. I haven’t used oil and acrylic; just pure watercolour pigment because it’s very fluid, very pure and ecofriendly. Some of the works are on beautiful raw linen to bring out more of that earthy element.
There is a beautiful piece on linen titled ‘Home’ which draws you into its inner doorway. Tell us about that.
I tried to anchor all the paintings in a piece of scripture. Lorin Roche has a beautiful translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra titled ‘The Radiance Sutras’ which I would read before beginning a new piece. The mind would settle on a passage, and this work is based on one such passage that is about home. It’s something you think about as part of the diasporic community — what does it mean to live in America, to have a home here, build a home for my children, not a house. So home is kind of a very live, very vibrant concept. Again, home is essentially where the heart is, where your consciousness rests peacefully, where you can be yourself, there’s no pretence, you’re not trying to prove anything, or you’re not on the hamster wheel. You’re just at rest.

Were all the works inspired by verses from the Bhairavi tantra?
For every single work, there’s a verse. That’s sort of my process. I open the book, I find a verse, close my eyes and let the verse become embodied, without analysing it but just letting the ancient sutra wash over the consciousness, and then that informs the work. You know, sometimes it’s kind of right on point like home, sometimes it’s more adjacent like in ‘Krishna’. The title sometimes emerges from that verse. But the art is not about Trishla, which is a very limited identity. It’s more universal. It’s about the sutra. It’s about this ancient wisdom. This probably comes from my literature background; words are just so important to me that I wanted to make sure that I had space for them in the process. And ‘The Radiance Sutra’ is such a gem but I don’t see it talked about it that much. You know people quote Rumi and Shakespeare all the time. They talk about the Gita and Ashtavakra, and even the Buddhist sutras, but this is the kind of gem that I feel will probably inspire my work for a long time.
SAVE THE DATE: Preview of ‘Nowness in time’ at Akara Contemporary, Mumbai on August 10, 6pm. On view till September 18