poet | artist

The only way to reach out sometimes is as a hydra would, if it were a real thing. With one flexible neck outstretched to a poem in a tree, another face bathed in the dynamic beauty of a fast-fading sunset, and several heads tossing and turning like dancers wearing sparkling earrings. It’s in the nature of hybrid arts to extend forms.

This ancient Greek hydriai, portraying the mythic battle with Hydra, a many-headed monster, looks sweet with its twining motifs and geometries. I agree with the myth: we have to fight our many-mindedness and become mindful, or, at least, “of one mind” about what matters. Rather than battling it, though, I think we have to embrace our intrinsic many-sidedness to accomplish this.

I gave a talk recently about hybrid art forms and why I’ve started to embrace them in my own practice. It was tough to explain, even to myself. Why take on such a leap?

Bridging forms in artistic practice can feel risky and can make the work feel incomplete. But this can be a good thing because, in a very basic way, it helps me overcome the limiting force of perfectionism in my work.

Beyond that, a hybrid art practice can be a good fit when an artist has a hybrid identity (and many do). And that’s where I find myself: Indian-Tamil-American-Midwesterner has a lot of hyphens in it. The leaping across cultures, languages, urban-rural, and dichotomies in general is a bit exhausting. Why shouldn’t my artistic practice reflect my reality, and even benefit from my finely developed ability to straddle frames of reference?

And anyway, it makes things interesting. Bringing my formal training as a poet into conversation with my emerging watercolor practice helps me do better in both.

For example, the scope for vocabularies, syntactic arrangements, and stylistic gestures in both forms have some overlap:

• Vocabularies – Words have shapes and meanings, and so do forms in a painting.
• Syntax – The directionality of grammar can parallel the directed movement of the eye across the light and dark areas, or foreground/background of a visual artwork.
• Gesture – White space exerts a gestural force both in poetry and in watercolor paintings.

Not only is it possible to say more with two disciplines working in tandem, but I think there’s more opportunity to approach the source of creative energy when using both in harmony.

In my latest art exhibit, Herbarium of Abstractions, the works set out to examine the inner eye in process of artistic rendering. As the paintings are water-stains of the conscious experience of that examination, the poetic “label” indicates location and offers a description. My interest in herbarium arts and botanical science join forces with poetry, so that these works reflect my meditation on the ecology of creative energy.

The science of mind comes into focus in my paintings, along with the art of cultivating an awareness of the root of life.

This is something that I have observed many artists and poets accomplishing in their works. For example, Emily Dickinson created an herbarium with artful arrangements of flowers she collected, which makes me think of the many poems of hers that call those energies together, too.

Innovation in the arts is something that hybrid artworks do well. We aren’t throwing out the tradition, but using what we can to reach farther. A couple of artists whose works inspired me while I’ve been developing my project are Shahzia Sikander and Siona Benjamin, both of whom are south asian american artists.

I went to see an exhibit of Sikander’s work at the Morgan Library & Museum during the first year of my watercolor practice:

The way she was able to use her formal training and traditional motifs to delve into the subconscious and to make social commentary visible is part of my inspiration and aspiration.

How Shahzia Sikander remade the art of miniature painting, by Naib Mian, The New Yorker, June 1, 2022

I met Siona Benjamin nearly 15 years ago, and in her work what struck me most was her courage to transform abstract practice into forms that can question long-held cultural ideas.

Developing a personal style and claiming one’s voice are key to artists’ and poets’ strengths. That’s where a hybrid practice has helped me get both my artistic feet firmly grounded.

But going back to my formal training as a poet, I had two very strong mentors in the visual poetics space. Jen Bervin’s influence continues in many ways, but especially in my experiments with ways to bring art and science into better dialogue. Jody Gladding translates the world of experience into a world of what’s underneath the surface. They both continue to inspire me with their new work.

But this is what Jen was working towards while I was her student– Silk Poems.

The concerns of the poet can be very different from those of the scientist. That’s a very good reason that both should be working in complementary ways. If not, imagine what gets missed in both practices, and what catastrophes ensue.

Another aspect of hybrid arts, which is probably very obvious, is the way that it automatically extends one’s audience. Add the poetry audience to the visual arts audience and the science audience, and there’s a rich conversation to be had. And we can all change our ways of thinking, together. That can be a good thing if we make it so, as artists.