Letters I Never Sent: Dear Susie Hodge

Why Your Five-Year-Old Could Not Have Done That

Read in 2021–2026.

Dear Susie Hodge,

I am someone you would call an art novice. And I mean, novice as novice can get! Art was almost completely foreign to me growing up, and an adult life spent building my ‘left-brain’ skills for a career did little to change that.

Since I was a teenager, whenever I heard someone from the ‘right-brain’ fields like art and literature speak or share their views, I was always in awe, quite literally with-my-mouth-wide-open kind of awe. It felt like, in some inexplicable way, they were being more human than I was. Despite all the degrees I worked to earn, I felt almost dumb in many ways. And ever since I remember wanting what they had, whatever that skill/tool/perspective was.

So I took myself to quite a few galleries and spent embarrassingly long hours trying to look at something I couldn’t quite get, even though I very much wanted to. All of it felt like it was just in another realm. And then your book started off as my first, humble attempt to simply make myself a little better the next time I step into a gallery.

But boy, was I ready for this!

Pieces like The Dog by Alberto Giacometti brought about in me the same emaciated feeling of what it must be like for a personality to be overshadowed by hunger, despite the 70-odd year distance between that time and mine. For the first time, I could understand and appreciate what it takes to go back and elicit simplicity yet again, like a child would. I can never forget these lines from Picasso, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” and “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

I had a sort of epiphanic moment upon realizing what Frank Stella meant by saying “What you see is what you see”. I learnt to see that minimalism is not about emptiness but about empty-ing, and how important it is to build a muscle for the latter in a world that is constantly filling us up.

Beginning with modern art has also built an expanse in my head of what all art could be. Somehow, given the times we are in, that feels like just the right way to begin. I laughed, I was outraged, and I almost dismissed some pieces only to find out provoking those reactions was sometimes the whole point. I learnt to put on different lenses — ones made of mere geometric shapes, freehand strokes, bright colours, expressive brushstrokes, and so on. And through those lenses, I looked not only at art, but at specific periods in the past that no one should dare forget or miss learning from, filled with our biggest wars, their aftermaths, and some of our lowest times as humanity.

The read felt like an exercise in stimulating my own abstract thought. Sometimes, I even found myself wondering if I was slipping a little into delusion! But even that was new for me, to allow something to first exist without needing to pin it down in rationality. It stretched my brain’s capacity in many ways and expanded my muscle to feel things.

I am ever grateful to you for giving me a book that never left my bedside for the last 6-odd years, becoming this small little personal art gallery I could peek into every now and then. You’ve given me some of my most basic tools — at times, to transcend my physiological self, and at others, to fall back deep within into my own abstract layers of thought. It has been an experience like never before, thank you!

LettersINeverSent #SusieHodge #WhyYourFiveYearOldCouldNotHaveDoneThat #PrestelPublishing