It would have been nice to have Maya's sense of design. So we could decide which of her paintings would go where in this page — there are just so many in less than six months. About 50, she gathers, sitting on the large living room of her place in Jawahar Nagar, Thiruvananthapuram. Only a day before, this room was full of kids, learning art from Maya, who we knew as an architect before. But for the past few weeks, Maya has been surprising her Facebook friends with new paintings every day and then announcing a summer workshop for children. Another day it was a bunch of children holding up their own amazing paintings.
"Anyone can learn to draw," Maya Gomez tells you. Really, you ask again, and she goes back to her college days to explain. It was all hand sketches then. And in the first year of architecture, a lot of the students didn't know the basics of drawing but by the third year they all sketched. She knew then that art could be taught — not art, she corrects herself, but drawing. Maya herself had always loved to draw. Her old room at her parents' place in Thiruvananthapuram had a wall full of faces. People asked her if the face was hers, it looked so much like her. But she didn't mean that, it was just a random woman she drew then, and now.
When architecture became her profession, when there was a family to take care of, Maya let art hanging as an empty canvas on her living room drawing board. About seven years ago, she inadvertently became an art and design teacher. "Our school started following the Cambridge syllabus and Art & Design became a subject," she says. 'Our school' is the family-run L'école Chempaka in Edavacode. Maya ended up doing a lot of research for the course. And theory turned into practice when she found a lot of time for herself at home. Her twin boys had grown up and went away to the UK for their undergraduate course. Her husband was in Singapore for work. So evenings suddenly became a time to paint. And this is best said in Maya's words: "It was the first of November — the day when Kerala was formed as a linguistic entity. Myth has it that the warrior-sage Parasuraman, many centuries ago, flung his axe into the ocean to create the small strip of land that is Kerala. I had always struggled with the thought of ‘What to Paint’. And here, on November 1st, I had a story."
There came a series of Kerala paintings — Parasuraman, women in traditional costumes, a lady of the lake emerging from the green backwaters, Malayalam movie songs turning into pieces of art — Alliyambal Kadavil among them. Her Malayali women look special because they all have a shade of brown on them, not red and not fair. "It's burnt sienna," Maya names the shade. She likes it that there is beauty and meaning in those paintings. The colour, even when Maya doesn't try to explain its significance, brings both.
After Kerala Piravi came Christmas and the impatient Maya pushed herself to paint a triptych of the Nativity scene. Baby Jesus sleeps and the parents look on, a lamb looks at the strange phenomenon in the night sky. To read along with it is a fourth painting of the three wise men.
Colours keep coming to Maya's paintings in new ways — her Before Supper has each disciple in a different colour, making them distinct. "Sometimes what to paint depends on the colours I have left," she says. And when it isn't colours, it is songs — Chemparathy Poove, an old song, became a painting of the red flowers up front against a monochromatic temple background.
Maya's wisdom had to be passed on. And the workshops happened. Now she is crowded with so many ideas she is thinking of moving into art full time. For now there is art, architecture and teaching.
