Jawai, Commissions and Leopard Magic…
It was an explosive month. A month of learning and immersion. Made possible by the incredible support, hospitality and opportunity that Mr and Mrs Singh (Owners, founders and visionaries of the Sujan Collective) gifted me in creating paintings of the camp and its Leopards in return. This is ongoing and although I was hoping to finish the painting before Christmas, the details and motifs needed to do the environment and conservation story justice have been great, and demand more time. Trusting the process as ever, key to the work. I hope to finish the paintings in the new year and will hopefully share those in due course, with permissions.
A month to ourselves, as a family, in one of the oldest inhabited and ancient parts of India. We stayed at, undoubtedly, one of the most beautiful camps in India: Jawai - The land of leopards.
I have missed Travelling. Becoming a mother has challenged deeply the very core of what that looks like for me, and as a family we’ve made it our mission to establish a new way of creating the magic from under our feet. That way is starting to take shape as we envisaged. Jawai was a part in that very early beginning stage of working and moving and living as a family unit, in places that feel more like home in many ways than the Cornwall we have made a home in back in the UK. Wilderness and stories of animals. Mythic and ancient cultures and the co-existence of man and beast in a changing world.
The animal kingdom is where our hearts feel fullest and our spirit most settled. Isn’t it that way for everyone? So, ‘with a little help from our friends’ as a rockstar once put it, we lean into the opportunities that our spheres before and since marriage have gifted us. I wouldn’t call it work, it is more than that, to which we are immeasurably grateful for. It is truly a calling, a curiosity. Also a trust that the path grants us an education for our babies as they see and feel into this world. We take the opportunities that feel right. It’s always a sensory thing.
So Jawia, It is a haven. A conservation dream and very brave undertaking. I myself have known from childhood and my upbringing just what it entails to spearhead a conservation story and model, see it through, and be there for the challenges despite all the odds. The Sujan collective and personal endeavours and choices behind the scenes have paid off to steer a flagship world and enterprise of living, breeding, surviving and thriving leopards among people. Once shy illusive creatures hostage to caves and the highest hilltops, now the land is carefully managed to allow the once prosperous leopard a chance at regaining some confidence to come out the shadows and walk the land once again.
Paintings at the heart of this mission, we set forth and spent a month in camp. The first time I spent real time with a sketchbook again, and the children too. It was as I quietly expected: less drawing, more absorbing. Trusting my trained eye and mostly hungry photographic memory to do the work for me. Trusting my husbands photographic hand the most ! So mornings in the cold, and evenings circling hilltops while the sun pressed to the horizon beckoning in the night, was how we spent our time looking for leopards. And that we did and that we found! So many in fact that my children became more alert to snack stops and naps on the vehicle than the allure of seeing the spotted cat..! An evening spent with a mother Leopard and cub will go down as the best leopard sighting I’ve ever witnessed. Humbled and stirred to me core.
Meanwhile in camp, we had some dear friends working and staying in camp too, and the kids during the day played, and bumbled around camp distracting smiling staff and learning their indian, musical sounds and Vocabulary. We were blessed by the time there, and held so beautifully in the camp by all staff and owners who allowed it all to happen. A dream to land in such a camp and spend a month there.
Getting back and painting India’s land of leopards has been both challenging and joyful. In a time when I’m bridging the gap between my old world and that of a mother re-emerging since the nest of tiny ones, it has had a particularly intense yet magical feel. The paint behaves differently to how it used to. I see differently to how I used to. I am curious by much the same, yet the focus wanes into new territory than before. Subtle, yet distinctive patterns and changes that I dare not ignore for the artist’s way is truth, and tricking oneself into painting in a formulaic way both dulls and weakens the mind and work. No, one must continue to push truth out even if the paint pushes back. And that is what has happened this year. The images have found a new way to emerge and I listen. The work is slower than before, but I feel more connected to the stories that lay at each stroke. For how can there not be more depth than before, when I now have a family to fill my heart first and foremost at each canvas.
Paintings have been plentiful on the back of this trip, but to show them will come in time. For the commission is for the time spent in camp, and my debt has not yet been repaid and delivered.
