A Brief Hour of Beauty

The narrow stairway led me upstairs to a sparsely lit tiny foyer. I was at the threshold of Clint’s room. He left this world three decades back. However, Clint’s parents have always reserved a room for him in their house. The small bedroom had everything an artist would need: paintbrushes, colors, a wooden pin board smeared with colors, a chair, a table, his books…

Two wardrobes, filled with the 25,000 exquisite paintings and drawings he had left behind, took up most of the space. From one corner of the room, his favorite gods and a garlanded photograph of Clint glanced benevolently at me.

Joseph Uncle took out a pile of yellowed sheets of paper. Lovingly, reverently, he gave them to me to admire. Clint’s art that his parents value more than their life.

Silence fell, as we speechlessly glanced through Clint’s pictures that throb with a striking soulfulness which communes with any sincere onlooker.

Brilliantly colorful, balanced, and proportionally perfect, they at once exuded the skill and dexterity of a master along with the inherent simplicity and innocence of a child.

Chinnamma chechi peered over her husband’s shoulder and said, “Show Ammu the picture mon drew of her and her sister…”

Woken up from a reverie, Joseph Uncle scanned through another set of pictures with renewed enthusiasm. With a hearty laugh, he pulled out a painting of two little girls near a swing, under the green canopy of a big tree. “That’s you,” Chinnamma chechi pointed at the shorter one in a yellow and black polka dotted dress.”

“That’s me?” I stared disbelievingly at the painting. As warm misty memories of a brief yet beautiful friendship filled my heart, I realized I was going to write his story.

A Brief Hour of Beauty, my book, is Clint's biography, the story of the master artist, Edmund Thomas Clint, who died at the age of 6 leaving behind a whooping 25,000 drawings and paintings in crayons, pencils, pens, pastels, watercolors.

Art, beauty, genius, innocence, struggle, hope, pain, love, and loss make up the seams of Clint's story.

Clint dreamt to become a warrior like Abhimanyu of the epic of Mahabharata who mastered the art of entering an almost impenetrable army formation when he was in his mother’s womb. In a lot of ways, Clint was an Abhimanyu, the valiant prince who fought his war heroically and died young.

The book's available at http://www.uread.com/book/brief-hour-beauty-ammu-nair/9788172344429