Thoughts to images with each brush stroke!

Painting walls is a whole lot of fun. And the students of Santo Minguel High School, Taleigao got a chance to immerse in this fun experience at their school campus recently as they got together to adorn the campus wall with their own creative expressions as part of a five day workshop Stories on the Walls. The workshop was conducted by art educator, street and mural artist Ruchin Soni and organised by The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) in collaboration with Serendipity Arts Trust (SAT).
Through the workshop, students explored their lived and personal experiences of Goa. Speaking about how he went about the workshop, Ruchin Soni explains that they first began with a game called Exquisite Corpse.
"The surrealist artists from France came up with this game in the early 1900s in order to have interesting writing and art material. And eventually artists like Salvador Dali and others also started using this particular game format as a visual art form and came up with amazing imagery," explains Ruchin, adding that this game is very important for children as it opens their mind to a lot of things. "Their creativity will get a boost and they will be able to analyse things not just in painting or art but in life as well for a different point of view," he says.
The game was played in the school in groups of tree where each child was given a paper to draw which was folded into three parts. "The first child draws a head, folds the paper and then passes it on to the next child who will draw a body and then pass it on to the third child who will draw the legs while hiding everything just drawn. The drawing from the head until the feet could be of either a human being, animal, reptile, bird, cartoon and so on. Then the child who drew the head gets their paper back, the result is a completely spontaneous creature created by 3 different people,"explains Ruchin. "This activity gave the students a sense of relief that they don't have to be realistic artists to do something creative."
The images created by the children through this game were then painted on the wall around the theme of education and what education means to them. "The kids came up with around 10 words on what education does to them like confidence, skill, knowledge, manners, experience, independence, awareness, intelligence, development, creative and impact. These words were then incorporated within the mural," he added.
Apart from giving children creative expression and teaching them to collaborate with each other, Ruchin believes that this project also enables children to gain a sense of confidence. " If a child thinks his work is good and if he is able to exhibit his work on a large scale in his school in front of all his teachers and fellow students it can be a huge confidence booster. It can be scary at that age to showcase your work. That sense of confidence and achievement is essential," he believes. Speaking further about how art education in the country can be improved, Ruchin stated that there was a need for art educatorsto keep coming up with new theories on how to teach the subject because it can become very monotonous after a point of time. "We change, our lifestyle has changes and therefore art and its mediums also have undergone a change. I think art education should adapt to the many changes at the same pace. It should not become still-life and portraitures. Art should be much more," he said.
As for the mural art tradition in India, Ruchin believes that while there are several traditional mediums, very few artists are exploring these today. Illustrating the example of the Jaipuri frescos, Ruchin points out that while there are very beautiful, it isn't being done too often now because mural making is a very lengthy process and sourcing the material can be difficult. "Times are changing and more contemporary mediums which are also very interesting are taking over. I think people and art are improving and moving towards an interesting direction," he says.