STROKE OF GENIUS

“We don’t believe change can be made with the intention of doing so. Our approach has been to learn from the community we are working with.”

Art in exchange for a place to stay? This is the novel idea that has allowed Meenakshi Jey and Jey Sushil to travel across the country, while also making a positive social impact along the way.

To paint is one thing, but to leave a lasting impression with your work is another. Meenakshi Jey and Jey Sushil (Mee and Jey) have managed to do the latter. The couple has travelled across 17 Indian states, painting murals in people’s homes, schools, orphanages, police stations, and even prisons.

From animals to toy trains, the couple has painted a variety of subjects—and posted about them on their popular blog, Artologue: Art For All (artologue.in).

When they started, Mee and Jey wanted to paint and travel, respectively. “In August 2013, we decided we wanted to stay at a friend’s place, and as a barter, we would paint a small corner of the house. We weren’t sure if such a project would work, so we invited people to paint the walls of our home,” says Mee. Anybody who was interested in experiencing a creative process, whether they knew Mee and

Jey or not, was invited, and nearly 50 people—engineers, doctors, corporate employees, journalists, photographers, school and college students—visited their home over four weekends. They painted everything from masks to favourite birds, a reinterpretation of the three wise monkeys, and abstract designs. The overwhelming response encouraged the couple to start travelling and painting walls across India.

In the process, the duo introduced many young minds to art. Once, when they were painting a school wall in Muther, in Bihar, some female students asked them if they could keep their paint brushes.

“They told us they were seeing such colours and brushes for the first time in their lives,” recalls Jey. In Rajasthan’s Sheolpura village, when the art supplies weren’t enough for the entire school to participate, the couple made blue paint out of indigo and brushes out of dried twigs and threads from discarded rugs, thus delivering a lesson in recycling.

How does a commissioned artwork usually come about?

“We show the family Meenakshi’s [previous] work and ask them what they want. Then, questionby-question, we dive deep into the discussion, at times trying to evoke childhood memories. We pick the memories to work on,” explains Jey.

Though the couple moved to the

US in 2017, they have places left to visit and people left to work with, in India. Jey pins the Northeast on the top of that list. In the meantime, they’ve continued their work. In 2019, they worked with undocumented migrants in Texas, crafting butterflies out of colourful clay. Why butterflies? “Because they know no boundaries,” says Mee, “and they symbolise the immigrants, who only add to the social and cultural beauty and wealth of the country they come to.”