Shrewsbury
Emily Shrewsbury
ENGL 304
Flash Prose Activity #1
I had always wanted to visit the VMFA, it was on my list of things to do while I was at
VCU. But I had never had the time to do so. Not until I was required by assignment. Picking one of the two choices was easy. I could kill birds with one stone; get the assignment done and cross off visiting the VMFA all in one trip. The real question was how I would get there. Walking was out of the question, a half an hour walk was too much time and I wasn’t sure my legs could make it that far. The bus ride, at least according to map quest, look just as long due to frequent stops.
And a bike? Not a chance. I don’t own a bike yet alone know someone who had a bike I could borrow. Most of my friends drove and even then they don’t have their cars on campus. It was just my luck that I was going home to visit my family for the weekend which lead to the ride over.
Friday morning came around, I was ready to get out of English 301 and make my way over to the oh so popular VMFA. Within minutes of getting out of class I was picked up in my father’s shiny, red Ford truck. I wasn’t sure what I would focus on at the VMFA until my brother in the back seat asked about my art history class. It clicked. I would check out the Indian Art Wing while Stephen and my Dad did whatever they were up to for the visit. I never expected them to come inside, so I was a bit surprised when they walked up to the entrance with me. It took all that was in me to keep from gasping at the front doors. Just the architecture to the entrance was amazing. I couldn’t imagine what the actual art galleries would look like. A quick hello and brochure from the woman sitting at the welcome desk was all I needed to look around.
Wanting to see everything overwhelmed me and I was constantly reminded by Stephen to take a deep breath, to slow down. After wandering around for an hour or so, we finally went to

Shrewsbury the Indian Art Gallery. Finally, something I could understand fully. Thanks to my art history class last semester, I was well oiled in my knowledge on Indian art. Taking the steps one at a time, I reached the second level, and allowed myself to gaze upon the simple, yet amazing architecture of the steps. It felt almost as if I was floating on air. I could hear the clicking of my shoes as we turned the corner into the ancient Indian section of the museum. The room had dim lighting with red, crimson walls allowing the grey schist, red and white sandstone artworks to jump out in contrast. It was almost as if I was sent to another universe. As if I was in rewind, reaching back to ancient India before the Common Era.
Behind me I heard the shuffling of feet as a group of students, seemingly on a field trip, pushed past me. “Whoa,” my brother whispered under his breath. With a smile creeping across my lips, we walked forward to the glass boxes that held figures of Buddhist, Hindu and Jainism art. With each piece I explained all that I had learned from my class; what styles indicated which religions, how certain details meant certain things according to critics I had studied throughout my art history classes. I was fairly well versed on Buddhist and Hindu art so I was stuck when I reached what seemed to be Buddhist art but didn’t quite fit the profile of it.
The statue was a figure called Jina, Probably Shreyamsanatha . According to its small silver-grey plaque it was made around 1160 CE. The artist was unknown, leaving my thoughts with questions of what this artist meant to achieve in the piece. White marble, the medium of the work, was hard to work with in the time it was made. Knowing that, I had to wonder how much time this took to create and the effort behind it. It was like I had a hold on everything in that gallery except this one. It stuck out with its simplicity. The figure was sitting on a much elaborated pillow with lotuses engraved in it. His body was in meditation, much like the Buddha is depicted, yet he had no clothes on, causing me to question what that meant, if it had meaning

Shrewsbury behind it. The piece had simple shapes that made up the entire work; the face was a simply circular with perfect symmetry along his eyes, lips and ears. His frontal square like body showed the same, the simplicity of it drew my eyes. I couldn’t stop looking. It was almost as if the artist was trying to create a perfect representation of whoever this Shreyamsanatha was, as if he was a divine figure. He actually happened to be one of the many divine prophets, the eleventh Jina to be exact, that reached enlightenment in Jainism.
The group of students, who seemed to be middle schoolers, slowly made their way around to where I was standing and I could hear their hushed conversations when they reached the artwork I was so intrigued with. “Too bad they didn’t know who the artist was,” a voice next to me said. She was talking to no one in particular so I answered back with a comment on how it was a shame. “Yea, we could of learned so much from them, why they made this work mostly and the context of it too,” she said more to herself than me. Her group moved to the ending turn of the gallery and she shuffled to catch up with them.
Lost in what she said, I questioned if we could really learn about the piece just from the artist. Yes, if we had known him or her we would know what the piece meant and why it was made. I just couldn’t believe that the only way to read this piece of work was through the artist.
It, in my eyes, answered my questions just by itself. I didn’t need the artist to tell me what it was meant for, or why it was made. It clearly was meant to depict a divine like figure, to honor him, maybe even worship him. The fact that I didn’t need to know about the maker is what made me so interested with it. That’s what made my feet glue to the floor and look at the illuminated figure for more than twenty minutes. I had to be pulled away from my spot as my father ended a phone call with my mother saying, “We’re leaving right about now. See you at home.”