Elizabeth Justice
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11/16/2020
Janak - Part 5 of 5
"As you become you, you have to want to become better. That's the first thing. You have to want it. As you go and search for an answer, you get multiple perspectives. When you get multiple perspectives, you have a full range of answers. Not from just this religion or this faith. Intuitively, the right answer will come to you. I feel my art has helped me to find the spiritual core of myself.
Now that my children are older, I have more time to ponder. When I'm painting, I'm in my own cocoon. I talk to myself, my inner self, my subconscious, my soul. You can call it by any name. I have this beautiful conversation with myself. Hopefully, when I come out of that trance, come out of my painting, I am marginally a better human being. All souls are beautiful at the core.
I use the word faith versus religion because we all could be different, you know. We could be following different religions, but our faith on the inside is - be good, do good. That's the core of everything. I'm very curious about different societies, cultures, faiths, and how they all come together.
The more I'm painting, the more I see myself. I'm saying something with every brush stroke on the canvas. I am saying something that I myself may not know. I've been painting for 40 some years, but I was not always deeply connected. I was just making some beautiful stuff. It's lately, I would say in the last three years, it's merged with me. It's merged in a very holistic way.
Bad things happen, sure. You know, unfortunate things happen. Challenging times come, illnesses happen, but you have to overcome. Everybody is going to ask that question, 'why me?' There is no answer for 'why me.' We have to have faith that things will come together. We will find strength. Nobody is without challenges. And you need faith for that. I'm a practicing Hindu. But to me, it doesn't matter. I love to pick things from other faiths and see the commonality between everybody. Peace, love, charity, hope, all those beautiful things. It's not a religion if it doesn't preach these things. It's a cult.
I am human. It just takes one day for everything to unravel, and I have a terrible, terrible day. But I crawl out of that bad day. I will be honest, sometimes it takes quite some time. It's a journey, and I hope I'm one step better than yesterday.
I am always on a high while painting; it's always my place of bliss, even as a child. My art now has meaning. Now I can see a visual of my insides that was once abstract. I can tell a story. It is coming out in colors and forms and compositions. And, you know, others may only see it as trees and flowers. But to me, there's a lot more going on. I'm not just painting colors; each painting is a little piece of my insight. I can feel it. I couldn't before, but now, I do.
And that's a beautiful thing because you're starting to see things that are not just physical. You're listening to yourself.
My art and my spiritual core have come together. We now have a common journey, and it's beautiful."
Janak Narayan identifies herself as an Indian American Fine artist focusing on acrylics and oils. Health setbacks had her step down from her twenty-five-year career in the finance and banking industry, and she decided to pursue her passion in the arts. She has taken her passion for life and color to create compositions that are both joyful and healing.
IG:
FB: Janak Narayan Fine Art
www.janaknarayan.com
11/12/2020
Janak- Part 2 of 5-
"Another mentor of mine at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, a wonderful friend, said, 'live your life in thirds.' So for any problem, I use that formula to see if it works for me. If I look at success in the world of thirds, there has to be a balance. I'm first and foremost, a family person. My family is very important to me. I am blessed.
My art has to be of a certain caliber. A third of my success needs to come from the fact that academically I am being challenged. I want to paint, not what other people tell me, but whatever is coming from within me.
And a third is always projected to the community. My time, my money, my art has to be a source of joy and healing for others.
Success, to me, is not one thing. One without the others isn't going to work. In India, in Hinduism, Lakshmi is the goddess of prosperity. People always think prosperity is about money, but, you know, she comes with eight facets. You have to have a bit of everything - children, good health, career, relationships. You have to be rich in money, rich in family, rich in love, and rich in career. People think it's just monetary, but it takes a lot more than that to be happy and consider yourself successful.
I first started painting when I was 10 years old. I was interested in everything artistic. I learned macramé, I learned ceramics. I wanted to learn everything I could.
My biggest inspiration is nature. I'm very fond of painting botanicals, especially trees. So, I look at the limbs and the light that comes in-between. I look at the negative space more than the actual form because the best color palettes come from filling in those little gaps. Those gaps have a fascinating mosaic of colors.
Nature is God. I'm not here to replicate it or one-up anything. It is divinity itself. I am here to give it a completely different brushstroke. I enjoy painting outside the lines and outside the color confines.
People describe my work as being vibrant and full of movement. I don't want my art to be static. Every time you look at it or even move your eyes, you should see a different part. It's about layering. It's organic, as it should be. It's about practice. It's all about knowing yourself as you change.
Art has to have heart, and it has to reflect you. When you look at my painting, it should reflect my state of mind. If it doesn't, I'm really not projecting 100 percent into my art. That is the process.
My art has evolved from being very representational to an expressive feeling. That's why I call my art Transitional Expressionism because it's neither representational nor Abstract in its pure sense. Like a Post-Impressionist, it moves in layers. This is how I see the world.”
Janak Narayan identifies herself as an Indian American Fine artist focusing on acrylics and oils. Health setbacks had her step down from her twenty-five-year career in the finance and banking industry, and she decided to pursue her passion in the arts. She has taken her passion for life and color to create compositions that are both joyful and healing.
IG:
FB: Janak Narayan Fine Art
www.janaknarayan.com/
11/11/2020
Janak - Part 1of 5 -
"I am surrounded by hundreds of fabulous artists! Then when you look at social media, there's the whole world out there. I have to reel it in and say I cannot feel overwhelmed. So I go back and say, 'how do I make the best version of myself?' The simple answer is hard work. That means consistently painting, consistently doing creative work. Not getting into that, 'Oh, it's a hobby that I don't feel like doing today,' or 'I'm not in the mood, and the creative juices are not flowing.' I think those are excuses. If it's my profession, like a doctor, like any other person who goes to work, I have to put in the work. If I don't feel like painting, I'll go out taking pictures. Or read about old masters or visit some museums. Like one of my professors in college said, 'you have to be prolific.'
We came here to the United States more than three decades back, both my husband and myself. We've been married for thirty-six years, and we have two boys. He is a scientist, and my background was in finance. I came to do my MBA, and I had a career as a banker and in finance.
Then in 2003, I had a pretty bad health setback. In my profession, I was dealing with money and numbers. It was not working with me being heavily medicated, so I had to quit.
One door closes, another door opens. My faith is very strong in the positive energies of the universe. I’d been painting since childhood, and I told my husband I'm going to do graduate work. My younger son was going to graduate school, and guess what? I'm going to go to graduate school too. And that's how the beautiful journey started. I started in 2010, and I graduated with a BFA in 2015 from Indiana University, Fort Wayne.
The fascinating thing about the five years I went to school, to me, it was anesthesia. I would not feel pain inside the building. Honest to God, I could not feel that I was hurting. And I used to be in excruciating pain. I would be full of pain when driving my car to the visual arts building. Inside the building, the pain is gone. Nine hours later, outside the building, I'm again in pain.
That's why my tagline is 'Joy and Healing.’ It's joyful to watch a beautiful thing, but I have never found anything so healing. I just hope somewhere, somehow, an opportunity comes that I can give that healing, whether, to veterans, individuals with special needs, or within hospitals, I don't know. It has not happened yet. But that is something I would love to do. To create art to make people feel as if, even if just momentarily, the pain is gone."
Janak Narayan identifies herself as an Indian American Fine artist focusing on acrylics and oils. Health setbacks had her step down from her twenty-five-year career in the finance and banking industry, and she decided to pursue her passion in the arts. She has taken her passion for life and color to create compositions that are both joyful and healing.
Janak Narayan Fine Art
https://www.janaknarayan.com/
"When you think of unity, you think of a union, when you think of a union, you think of one.
And so there are diverse parts. There are many parts. But if you allow the individual to be individuals and embrace and connect, it will bridge unity. So if I'm not judging you, you're not judging me. I'm free to be me. You're free to be you. But yet those unique parts play a part that will create the whole.
I like to look at it like a symphony. You may have a flute. You may have a clarinet. You may have a saxophone.
If there were sheet music involved, as a clarinet, I cannot look on the flute sheet music and say you're playing wrong. Or the flute cannot look to the saxophone and say you're playing wrong. I need you to stay on the flute music. I need you to stay on the saxophone music because there's a conductor. And at the right time, the right season, the right place. He'll bring in the flute. He'll bring in the saxophone. He'll bring in the violins and the violas because he's the conductor.
And so it is with God. One God, one Father of all. Everything has its place. There's a time and a season. And in his divine wisdom, in time and season, He'll bring in this part. He'll bring in that part. First Corinthians tells us, 'we know in part. We prophesy in part. When that which is perfect is come, that which is in part is done away with.'
I think some of the ills, good and bad from the past, it played a part. There were parts to be played in the 60s. There were parts to be played during the times of slavery. And there were parts to be played when America expressed its need to be free from Great Britain. Those were all parts. The climate in which we live now is another part, and though we may not understand the whole canvas. Every part in God's divine timing in season will reveal the whole.
'We know in part. We prophesy in part. But that which is perfect is coming. And that which is in part will be done away with.'
We've got a lot of questions right now. But I'm convinced. I have faith, and I'm hopeful that these questions will be answered.
Why? Because First Corinthians continues, 'the greatest of these is love.'
Love is what brings unity."
Deborah Bradford is the Associate Pastor of New Jerusalem Baptist Church in McKinney, TX.
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