Arjun Shivaji Jain: Solitude, If I Must Thee Accept

“There’s a club if you’d like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home and you cry
And you want to die…“

(The Smiths, How Soon is Now)

Arjun Shivaji Jain, Solitude, If I Must Thee Accept, February 2016, watercolour on paper, 1’10” x 1’3″

“Solitude, If I Must Thee Accept” is an interesting artwork that I have recently discovered. It was painted by a contemporary Indian artist Arjun Shivaji Jain during his university days in London in February 2016. Those days were marked by a feeling of loneliness, which is stated on his page also, and the painting’s title was inspired by the lines from a poem by a Romantic poet John Keats; “O solitude! if I must with thee dwell,/ Let it not be among the jumbled heap/ Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,— Nature’s observatory…” To see more of his work visit his page here. The painting’s title captivated me and the painting itself instantly chimed with me because solitude is something that I am well-acquianted with. We are not only acquaintances but good friends; solitude and I. At times I wander off from this friend and spend time with other friends, but Solitude is a friend which is always here for me.

This painting puts us – the viewers – in a position of a Peeping Tom. The painting is a magnified view through a keyhole, but there is nothing voyeuristic about it in a way the same motif would have been depicted in the art of the Rococo artists such as Fragonard. Two sides of the keyhole reveal two different worlds; one pitch black and quiet; the other, full of vibrancy, music and laughter. The bright yellow floors, lime green walls and yellow lights all bring to mind the garish interiors of night cafés in Vincent van Gogh’s art. The figures of the party people are elongated and simplified, the girls’ long white limbs are almost doll-like and this makes me think of the people from the video for Pulp’s song “Common People”. I can imagine the brunette in the black dress talking to the guy in the blue coat and him later singing about their conversation, as the lyrics from the “Common People” song go; “She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge/ She studied sculpture at Saint Martin’s College/ That’s where I/ Caught her eye/ She told me that her dad was loaded/ I said, in that case I’ll have rum and Coca-Cola/ She said fine/ And then in thirty seconds time she said/ I wanna live like common people/ I wanna do whatever common people do/ Wanna sleep with common people/ I wanna sleep with common people like you…” Perhaps they are dancing, drinking, talking and laughing but we are still on the other side of the party; observing it, but not participating in it, which brings to mind Morrissey who was well-acquainted with solitude in teenage days and later on. As he sings in the song “How Soon is Now”; “There’s a club if you’d like to go/ You could meet somebody who really loves you/ So you go and you stand on your own/ And you leave on your own/ And you go home and you cry/ And you want to die…”

The painting wonderfully expresses many feelings; the feeling of solitude, not being able to connect with others, a feeling of not belonging etc., but another interesting thing about it is definitely the duality of the two worlds; the black world surrounding the keyhole which is mysterious and we know nothing about it apart from its uninviting, all pervading darkness, and the fun, colourful world where the party is taking place. This duality made me think of a painting style that Milan Kundera’s heroine Sabina from the novel  “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is using. In the novel Sabina is a free-spirited and freedom-loving painter who was an art student under the strict Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and had to paint strictly in the Realist style but she found her ways of portraying both worlds; the ugly realist one and the other one. This is what Sabina says in the novel: “Here is a painting I happened to drip red paint on. At first I was terribly upset, but then I started enjoying it. The trickle looked like a crack; it turned the building site into a battered old backdrop, a backdrop with a building site painted on it. I began playing with the crack, filling it out, wondering what might be visible behind it. And that’s how I began my first cycle of paintings. I called it Behind the Scenes. (…) On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop’s cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract. (…) On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.” Realistic vs mysterious, truth vs lie, colours vs black, quietness of solitude vs loudness of the party; I see the same contrasts that Sabina talks about right in this painting here. All in all, I think it is a wonderful painting both on compositional and on symbolic levels and I especially love it because I can relate to it so strongly because I feel that I am always that person just observing life and ‘other people’s parties’ but never participating in it, and I am not sure i even want to.