All Framed

And ready for brand new walls -

Over at a Blog Down Under

I am guest writer over at Local Story Space, a wonderful Australian blog featuring creative women. I decided to write on the subject of what Beauty means to me, why it is so important to me and how it inspires what I make.
You can read the post by clicking the link over here >>>

Favourite Things

A Fine Exhibition of Sculptures

About a week ago one of the first readers of my blog who is both a mathematician and photographer, visited me here in Bangalore. Conversation was very interesting and varied (mathematics isn't about adding and subtracting, it is about patterns!),there was a wonderful exchange of opinions and a very thoughtful gift of a beautiful seedpod.My visitor was a Mumbikar and I was pleased when he specifically requested Filter Coffee since he had seen it featured on my blog. The kind of filter coffee you get at a South Indian home will never be found elsewhere!

      by Sagar Kolte

I took my visitor to the beautiful National Gallery of Modern Art. The picture of the tree above is taken by him. At the National Gallery there was a wonderful exhibition of sculptures by a South Indian Sculptor KS Radhakrishnan. The show is titled Mapping with Figures and is on till the 27^th of December. Unlike most of the dreary work I’ve seen by popular fine artists from this corner of the world, the work of KS Radhakrishnan was vibrant and invigorating to look at. I liked the work so much that I made time to go there yet again and sketch the sculptures. While I wanted to come home and improve on the drawings further, it will be a while before I do so. Until then, here are some of the pictures from the show. Far better pictures of the works can be seen on the website of this artist over here >>

The shadows created by these sculptures are as beautiful as the works themselves. They form a part of the artwork by lending their beauty to it.

 

One more beautiful work

A couple of my quick sketches of these works done at the exhibition -

I am glad that NGMA brings us massive well curated shows by these wonderful artists which we in the South would not have gotten to see otherwise. Their efforts are indeed commendable. So far I've seen exhibitions by Ram Kinker Baij, KK Hebbar, Amrita Sher Gill and now KS Radhakrishnan. Good art leaves you with a sense of fulfillment. I only wish the quirky little circus side shows in the name of fine art that keep popping up and bursting like soap bubbles within this city had more integrity and substance. It is always sincerity rather than showmanship that endures.

Blue Seedpod

Lessons
Living Blue

The Unknown

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together.
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether man or woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?
~ From The Waste Land.
T.S. Eliot


It is important to have a secret,
a premonition of things unknown.
It fills life with something impersonal,
a numinosum. A man who has never experienced 
that has missed something important. He must sense 
that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious;
that things happen and can be experienced which remain
inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. 
The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. 
Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite 
and ungraspable.
~ Carl Jung

It never ceases to amaze me how great literature and divine music gives expression to those strange, unfathomable choices and complexities of human existence.

Amrita Sher-Gill

During those rare moments while standing before exceptional art, apart from engaging in it, one also becomes acutely aware of the puerile virtual eye-candy that we are constantly fed with in the name of art and illustration on the internet…How insidiously bad art creeps into our psyches and takes root into something malignant that eats away at our souls. Do we even know why we click the ‘like’ button anymore? Are we even aware when we comment with trite platitudes?

What first struck me about Amrita Sher-Gill’s paintings was the integrity in her work. When I stood among her paintings I felt as the same sense of reverence one gets while standing under an old and ancient tree. None of the photographs of her paintings will equal standing before her actual work, the strength and subtlety she created with her brush.
This excellent exhibition was ‘curated’ in the true sense of the term by Yashodhara Dalmia. One could appreciate and follow the progress and development of Sher-Gill’s work, the elevation of her painting over the years into simplicity and abstraction. One marvels at the sheer speed of prodigious achievements in the succession of her canvases in the span of her 28 years.

If Milton Glaser said that the function of art is to make us aware of what is real, Sher-Gill’s work did that for me but also much more. Her work has that quality of truly great creation, it has depth. It is a strong and beautiful reminder that life and art are connected and are reflections of each other. It is also a reminder that how we live daily and what we see constantly influences who we are and what we create.

George Bush's paintings