Mystery painting

Mystery Painting (Tamil, mayachitram) is a painting technique developed by Canadian artist Paul Hogan, co-founder and creative director of the Butterfly Peace Garden (BPG) program based in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka. Since the early 1990’s the BPG and has been helping traumatized children from communities torn by civil violence via on-site and outreach programs which promote healing of individuals and communities. These programs are centred on activities associated with visual art, music, storytelling, theatrics (including clowning) and dance, conducted in an atmosphere of expression, contemplation and play. Hogan believes that in order to create such an atmosphere the adult supervisors, or animators, must avoid impressing acquired notions of value, utility and intention upon the spontaneous playfulness and creativity of young children. Towards that end he has been involved in the development of a variety of techniques which help adults adopt a naive approach to art, and mayachitram is one such technique.

Mayachitram uses simple and readily accessible materials: watered-down acrylic or poster paint, basic brushes and paper, canvas or board laid on the floor or other convenient surface. Operationally, the process can involve a variety of ritual, meditative or social constructs and contexts. Technically, there are three basic stages: 1) Making a template - a random collection of black lines is painted on a white surface without overt intention (some practitioners paint with their eyes closed). The tangle is then tidied by evening out the lines and cleaning rough edges by filling in with black paint and/or trimming with white. 2) Finding a story - the lines in the template are studied from all angles as they are broken, joined, hidden, resurrected, shortened and extended in a playful search for characters and stories amid the tangles. When a story finally appears that cannot be ignored, everything else not needed is whited out. 3) Colouring – the emerging story is brought to life with coloured paint using much the same approach as in a colouring book.

The description presented here concentrates on the most tangible and observable aspects of mayachitram. Discussions of its artistic, meditative and psychological aspects are available elsewhere.

External links

• [1] An example of Mystery Painting in action.