As Julie Andrews puts it best in 'The Sound of Music', let's start from the very beginning – the beginning of my relationship with Art.

I've always been rubbish at it. As a kid I had little ability in handling paper and glue, which means that my collages and origami works were always a messy affair with misaligned edges and glue on more surfaces than it should be. Still-life painting was also not my forte as my rendition of a lady's finger was repeatedly mistaken for a green chilli while my tomatoes had too much of an uncanny resemblance to red apples for my teacher's liking. I tried convincing them that my works were actually modern abstract art pieces but they didn't seem to buy the argument. They were however kind enough to give me a passing mark which ensured that I got promoted to the next year of school and I am eternally grateful to them for that.

Despite my early failures, it has been my ambition in life since my youthful years to 'make things' for a living. So upon admission to Junior College, I figured that I should get into the art program, believing that it would help me in my future University application. I then miraculously convinced the school's administration to accept me into it using my good grades in Design and Technology and rather unsurprisingly, I quit the program after two weeks out of my frustration at not being able to ‘get' what art was all about. I had a deep admiration for detailed illustrations and beautifully painted pieces but producing it and learning art history and theory was too much for this little brain of mine at that point in time.

At this juncture, you might think my relationship with Art would have been over, but it wasn't to be for our paths were to cross once again.

I wanted to pursue my creative ambitions and architecture seemed to offer that route. Soon enough, I discovered the promiscuous relationship between Art and Architecture and my own complicated relationship with Art was rekindled at the age of twenty-one.

Slightly reluctantly, I set foot once again into the Art world. I cautiously got myself acquainted with artworks again. I started consuming small doses of Modern Art and Contemporary Art. I visited galleries and museums with the simple purpose of exposing myself to what was out there. I attempted to read Art history and theory. In short, I embarked on a very scary journey through the world of Art.

Fast forward seven years and today, I am still terrible at art history and theory. I don't have a favorite piece of artwork. I don't collect art pieces. I still ask, “Is this Art?”. I still go to galleries and exhibitions without really knowing what exactly I'm looking at. I probably cannot recognize an artist's work or recall his name even if I've seen the same piece on five different occasions and I still need captions and write-ups to help me understand what the artist is trying to say.

However, what has changed is that I now find this world of Art no longer intimidating but rather intriguing. Time has allowed me to develop a sense of curiosity and with it the capacity for appreciation of the arts for its own sake. I now find myself in awe of many forms of visual arts. Sculpture and installation pieces now seem interesting. Performance art is now fascinating and I now fall asleep less often when reading about art.

Perhaps it's a new-found sense of maturity which is allowing me to embrace the fact that the world of Art is vast and that I can probably never wrap my head around it completely. Perhaps it's the ability to live harmoniously with the idea that I can interpret art in my own terms at my own time and perhaps most importantly, realizing that the enjoyment of Art partly lies in one's journey of discovering it.

As a Zen saying that I often refer to goes, "The beginner's mind is a beautiful place to come from". Such a state of mind is often the premise for many amazing discoveries and that is the reason why I proudly wear a big flashy badge with the words 'Art Beginner' on my chest till today. It will probably stay there for a very long time because the more I learn about Art, the less I know.

So while I would still keep my relationship status with Art as 'It's Complicated', one can say that it's of the healthy variety where we are discovering new things about each other constantly by keeping an open beginner's mind about it. So while I continue on my journey of discovering Art and sharing it with you on this piece of Canvas, does anyone else wants a ‘Beginner' badge like mine?