I Became a Black and White Artist

Not only was my salary the unusually high (for me) Rs 450 per month, but I was sitting every lunch-time at the managers’ table eating an English lunch culminating in delicious desert and coffee and I didn’t have to do any cooking except on Sundays when I was home.

I was now writing to children of the present rather than to those of the future. I was writing about ‘their’ problems, encouraging them in ‘their’ pursuit, congratulating them on ‘their’ achievements rather than of my own concerns. The more I wrote the more letters came in reply and I was breathlessly trying to keep up.

The paper soon found out I could illustrate. Illustrating or writing for the Sunday Magazine Section meant extra money. The editor of the Children’s Page began a weekly ‘monosyllabic short bit on the pranks of two mischievous boys’ Tik and Tok. I had to illustrate it.

I could not do this illustrating in the office; I had to take it home so that I could concentrate on it. I did the working out of the sketches in pencil on Saturday evenings and inked them in when refreshed after a nights’ sleep, on Sunday.

I was, in time, doing Tik and Tok cartoon, plus an illustration for the story for older children and another for the main article on the women’s Page. Each illustration was paid for at the rate of Rs 10 for a time, until increased to Rs 15.

Now and then while riding home on the tram, I’d get an idea for a story or article. The thing would be written in my mind by the time I arrived home; I had only to put it down on paper. I could do this of an evening, though I couldn’t do an illustration of an evening.

I was surprised on my first payment for an article to get Rs 60 for it. Thus from time evaluation for a bit of writing that took less time to do than an illustration, was very unjust accounting to my way of thinking. I kept silent.

My tram journeys to and from office were surveys of a field of information for me. My eyes were everywhere along the road, darting from one thing to another- people going to work, people hanging out their washing, people quarrelling, people creating a din, people in various garbs. I got out of the tram one stop sooner than the nearest to the office, to walk through the market and see another lot of activities. Then I joined the many legs and feet walking down Chouringhee road to various offices.

I found I could call to mind any figure just by closing my eyes and willing it. I called up a certain ethnic type. He was scratching where he shouldn’t be scratching before me.

Shocked! I opened my eyes

“Stella, you have a dirty mind.”

But a few days after, I saw such a fellow on a corner in a very busy place, doing the same thing. My mind was getting filled with a lot of images. I tried to use this ability to aid my growing insomnia. I’d call to mind beautiful country places, verdant green pastures, and graceful trees and walk through them. After a few nights, however, it refused to be a lullaby, a rocketry baby and rushed by at a tremendous speed until I became quite giddy and had to open my eyes.

Desmond suggested we should have an exhibition together with Nar Bahadin the Nepali who made decorative animals in pottery. They gave me the first room, the biggest and just inside, opposite the entrance. I placed my picture “He stole a Pen”. It WOULD be seen.

It was! People stood before it open-mouthed and said

“It couldn’t have happened here. She must have seen it in Bombay.”

The editor of the Statesman came and as a result, put a proposition to me. As far as sales were concerned I have little memory but I know I sold “Egg-stall” and “College Girls” to the east European lady who failed to by “Girls in the Wind.” She came in with her blind husband, describing each picture to him.

The press that had only a few years before energized me now did their best to disparage me, to run me down.

“Stella Brown never goes below the surface or rises very far above it …..a general lack of vitality”

Another wrote “Occasionally she uses painting for purpose of illustration and what she offers has the limitations of narrative Art. In this particular example (“He Stole a Pen”) she paints something which has apparently no connexion with the world we know.”

Another paper said I was now guilty of indecency in my painting, Mystified, I asked Desmond at the luncheon table, what they meant.

“The centre boy of the three in your picture “Graces and Disgraces” Seems to be giving a suggestive hand signal”

“He is holding a Cigarette.”

“No! He isn’t”

“Yes he is>”

“No!”

I went home and looked at the picture. Horror! I had left out this last little bit of detail, I had wanted to put in the cigarette because it was typical of a Calcutta youth flaunting his cigarette smoking as though it gave him sophistication and class as distinct from the cheap biri-smoking, The biri, smoked by the man in the street was clutched halfway down its stem, its tip sheltered in the hollow palm of the hand.

It was well I had packed away my paints or I would have been demoralized. But I had left that world. I was now doing week-end black and white drawings, not putting much store my them, signing them only with the single letter ‘S’.

The proposition put me by the editor was; to do a weekly cartoon for the front page of the Sunday Statesman on ‘Social Evils’. They themselves would select the quotation from Shakespeare. I would be paid Rs50 per cartoon. I was to do six before publication started.

I had completed three and was halfway into the fourth when the magazine editor went on leave and was replaced by another. This one wanted to pepper the magazine section with my illustrations. “Illustrate these” he demanded putting a sheaf of articles in my hands.

“I can’t. I haven’t the time”

“Nonsense! Of course you can. You can find time if you want to”.

He kept on like a yapping puppy at by heels. I felt pressurized.

The Chief Editor asked

“What about the Social Evils cartoons?”

Pressurized on all sides!

“I can’t do them” I said in desperation, so scuttling this opportunity.

The extra illustration work in the Magazine Section did not last long. The Art Department threatened trouble. All the ‘extra money’ illustrations were going to the memsahib leaving none for them. Thus the extra I didn’t want came to an end, too.

I was restricted to Children’s Page and women’s page. I didn’t complain.

Another exhibition came up;- one solely to show the work of women painters. I was asked to submit something as well as to be on the panel of judges. Two prizes were given offered by two donors, one of Rs100 the other, a medal. Since I was to be on the panel of judges I marked my entry ‘not for competition’. I submitted one picture; “Memory Breeds Premonition.” This was a sort of bastard picture conceived in Calcutta, carried out in Darjeeling.

The idea had come to me when I made the journey that summer from Dow Hill to Calcutta. I had arrived in Sealdah Station and found it difficult to get a taxi to take me to Balligunge. A Sikh driver eventually agreed and telling me it was dangerous, drove at a furious rate through the strangely- deserted streets. The city was ominously quiet and empty as if in a lull after a storm but waiting for the next one. I had the sensation of poverty and apprehension as when one economy goes and another has not yet come. I expressed it by thin, anxious-looking women in black with a last rupee in her hand, wondering whether the famine queues, the riots, the killings, the madness of the people were all going to come again.

I arrived late, or the others had arrived early for the judging and so they had gone by the time I came,

“Would you go around and make your choice” said the man in charge. I went around but could see nothing of distinction. They were all of the same dullness. I said so.

“The others agreed with you and said you were the only deserving one of both prizes”

I went to receive my prizes in a public ceremony. As I was coming away with the Rs100 the organizer sidled up to me and suggested quietly that since I had not wanted to compete I could give the Society the Rs100 and keep the medal. I kept both.

In 1956 an acquaintance came back from England with “Studio” number for me, containing in it an article on Indian Art, a reproduction of my “Girls in the Rain”. When I returned to England in 1963 I found it reproduced in another “Studio” publication, ‘The Seeing Eye’. This was the picture I had thought not worth sending to the American.

I took seven months ‘home leave’ in 1959. I was halfway through it when a message came from ‘The Statesman’ –

“This is in the nature of an S.O.S.”

It contained a number of the monosyllabic stories with a request that I should illustrate them as quickly as possible and pass them on to the London office. Meanwhile they were reprinting back numbers!

I did a couple of pencil drawings for a London publication (they would paint them themselves, they said) and was paid £5 each.

When I arrived back in Calcutta I was told of the embarrassment the cessation of the Tik and Tok cartoons had caused. The paper had been bombarded with hundreds of letters asking why. They had published a few of them. The letters had not only come from children but from all sections of the population;- lawyers, judges, teachers, reverend gentleman, you name it, they had been represented.

And I was paid Rs 15 for each cartoon!

I decided to leave India in 1963. The Chief Editor and his cohorts were with me in his office.

“What shall we do about the Tik and Tok cartoons?” they asked, waiting hopefully for a solution from me.

I kept aggravatingly silent. My mind remembered the difference between Rs15 for a cartoon and Rs 60 for a bit of writing.

“Go back home” said the Book Review Page editor,

“Don’t bother about getting a job. Paint! Do for England what you have done for India. You introduced Social Realm here with your picture “Son on Man”. Many followed, but you were the first.”

I had given the picture away to the Sweepers’ union, yet it had been remembered all that time!

Despite my having packed away my oil paints, I did take them out on the occasion of two annual holidays. On my visit to the Punjab I did a small portrait of Man Mohan Singh when a boy of 15 and on coming home did a canvas of the five brothers there with their one gun. The painting of the gun unfortunately was not convincing.

On another holiday, when I wanted a part of it to be spent in peace and quiet, I did a landscape of Chail with one figure.