Artist

by Vidyan Ravinthiran

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Last updated August 24, 2025

About this Poem

Vidyan Ravinthiran’s ‘Artist’ is a poem of profound intimacy about a moment in his wife's life: in her youth someone painted and drew; her brother made a comment ‘all you could do / was copy down what was in front of you.’ Now, years later, grown, married, she has shared this story with her husband, who has written a sonnet about it, holding the event to the light, examining it from different points of view. Every sonnet in Ravinthiran’s collection The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here addresses his wife, but the ‘you’ in ‘Artist’ expands the audience to anyone whose ambition to make is coupled with worry about their work’s quality and originality. The stage is laid with character – sister, brother. The scene moves from the past to the present, and the narratorial voice is generous. The incident is described without drama, and the brother’s apology for his remark is evidenced in ‘He’s bought you watercolours’, but nonetheless ‘what’s done is done’ and the memory of the words has stayed.
Beneath the poem’s action is a profound meditation on desire: the young person had a wish to be an artist, but was bruised by a remark: was it offhand? Was it intended? I don’t know. A person with a passion is often the subject of comment from others. It’s just a joke or I didn’t mean it, we hear. But it’s interesting how a pure desire often evokes dismantling attempts from those we are close to. The petty violence of the words that pass between us contains all kinds of intimacies and barbs. We know each other enough to say what might hurt; we are aghast when it does. We are secretly pleased for the cleverness of a quip but unprepared to learn how deep it cut. The artist is talented and committed. She began ‘young’ and now – years later – sketches, ‘touching with your eyes what has been given’. This drive – with its ‘again, and again, and again’ in a ‘self-forgetful vigilance’ – is nonetheless marked with ‘hesitation’. What is this pause? Is it the awful question of Am I a good enough artist? or Am I an artist at all? or Am I only copying? It isn’t always true, but it sometimes is, that the insults we remember best are the ones we suspect might be true. Is it possible that, while unkind, the brother’s barb provided the motivation to keep going?
The artist has chosen a partner who holds a key, perhaps, to understanding something of the language of the past. Art calls to art – words and image married – each a method of paying attention. The blank space, the elegant questioning, the shifting point of view, the self-reflective analysis too (‘For his role in your family was mine / in mine’) demonstrates that both poet and painter are adept at questions of nuance, aware of the void that haunts creators, and the difficulty inherent in acknowledging your own gift.
The first eight lines of this sonnet follow a pattern of rhyme: ABBA, ABBA. The rhymes aren’t perfect – ‘paint’ and ‘again’, ‘saint’ and ‘mine’– but the emotional music of assonance is evidenced in ‘do’ and ‘you’, ‘don’t’ and ‘moment’. Then the pattern modifies: the ninth to fourteenth lines end with ‘learn’, ‘means’, ‘given’, ‘raised’, ‘line’ and ‘even’. The words ‘given’ and ‘even’ echo each other’s acoustic demands, the rhymes move internally: ‘mine / in mine’ ‘again, and again, and again’. Two lines mimic each other almost completely: ‘It’s the way you were raised’ is followed by ‘The way you were erased.’ In a poem about unforgotten language, the rhymes – formal and informal, end-line and internal – carry a poignant message: love, pain, memory, language, desire and drive are part of every life, and sometimes the smallest thing is a locus for life-shaping attention.
If I have the time (although this is rare) I like to write a poem out longhand. It helps me see what’s there. Mostly, however, I type it. I noticed as I read back over my copy of ‘Artist’ that I’d made an error: ‘When you were young you’d draw and pain’ I wrote. The artist’s vocation does include pain: the desire to excel usually comes with that ache of What if it’s not good enough? or What will others think? (Good enough for what? A gallery? A textbook? Praise from a brother?) Technical prowess is what every artist might wish to improve. Even inspiration – that fleeting, strange thing – is temporary. But the impulse and propulsion to keep trying, to keep returning – ‘So you stopped. Sometimes you start again’ – is the sometimes-rewarding, sometimes-painful vocation of the artist.
A different poet, a different person, might have written about the bastard brother whose bruising wounds continue to this day. But the quiet action of Vidyan Ravinthiran’s sonnet would have been failed by such drama. The brother isn’t a devil; in fact ‘He is a saint’. The technique of this sonnet does not require exaggeration, or conflate an offhand remark with trauma. It’s intelligent about time, and intelligent about the way a person gives attention to that which they most fear. It sketches – with emotional sensitivity – how near to the heart our art is, how sensitively a person might wish to protect their making, and how closely we preserve the wounds that accompany our work.