The Werewolf

'It is a cold northern country; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. A child decides to visit her sick grandmother deep in the forest. She takes her father's hunting knife with her...'

Twenty years ago around this time, I traveled to Australia to study illustration. There I unlearned and relearned everything I ever knew about drawing, literature, language and illustration. Apart from expressing myself in words, I learned to voice my opinions visually. This was akin to learning a new language except that instead of putting down words on paper, I drew images. But then I learned how to draw these images in a way where they would say what I wanted them to say.I remember I drew far more than I had ever done until then and I remember trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t with my drawings. 

The image above was for a story by Angela Carter called The Werewolf which I did as part of my final project work at Queensland College of Art. It is based on the fairy tale of Red Riding Hood, but with a chilling twist - The wolf who attacks the girl on her way to her grandmother, turns out to be the alter ego of this grandmother-werewolf. The image denatures Little Red Riding Hood accordingly: the figure of the girl and the hood is traditional. The character of the girl and the setting are Carter.

The reason I put the picture above up on my blog was the similarity of the environment within it to the cold winter forests in Sutton (below) where I was taken for a walk. I am surprised that the environment that I created in my image twenty years ago ended up manifesting itself in real life later, even if only for one seemingly endless blink of an eye.

I am Elephant

This illustration is for my mushroom hunting friends who will be leaving their forest in Sutton to live in Montreal. I drew this picture so that Aaney the Elephant and champignons will be with them wherever they go.

Since returning to Bengluru I find I cannot quite remember whether one has to say le elephant or la elephant (something all students of French will agree has caused them to bang their heads on their Francaise textbooks and die), so when translated from French, the words within the bubble in the picture read ‘I am Elephant’. Aaney of course is the word for elephant in Kannada, the language spoken here.

The card was meant to be a surprise but since it has been well over two weeks since I posted it and since I am fed up with waiting for the package to reach I have decided to put up the picture on my blog.

Ashte

Coffee and Mushrooms

If I were asked about my happiest moments in Canada so far, I would say that it was outside of Montreal in a charming little village called Sutton. My visits there contained all of my favourite things – coffee, chocolate, mushrooms, forests, autumn leaves, cats, superb food...and my lovely angel-faced Quebecois hosts who always made sure my stay was memorable. The picture above is an illustration inspired by those wonderful moments and below are a glimpse of some of them.

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Present- that part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.
~ Ambrose Bierce

Wild Turkey

On my way to Sutton, I saw a flock of birds crossing the road. When I mentioned to my hosts that I saw what I thought were pheasants, they were very impressed. "Those are Wild Turkeys!" they said. I was told that it was a rare sighting and one that visitors like me were privileged to see. Later as we drove around Sutton through winter landscapes, we spied a flock of Wild Turkeys again. This time I managed to get out of the car and actually photograph them with my trusty point and shoot.
After I shot the turkeys with my camera, we shot one of them with a gun and then we took it home and made a meal of it.

I must say that country life is very exciting. First visit I got to hunt and eat wild mushrooms. Second visit, it is Wild Turkey on the table!



Okay,we didn't kill a Wild Turkey. The last picture is a marinated, very delicious turkey served to me from my first ever Thanksgiving meal here in Montreal :-)

Heart

Long ago I watched an Antony Bourdain show where he was invited into the home of an Inuit family in a remote part of Greenland in Quebec, Canada. They killed a fresh seal, brought it home, gutted the seal on the floor and proceeded to eat the innards of the seal. Then the host reverentially handed over the seal’s  eyeball to Bourdain who partook of it. The raw seal eyeball was delicacy, the best part of the seal. It was given to the guest as a gesture of friendship. The point was not so much in whether Bourdain ‘liked’ the eyeball or not but that he accepted that gesture. The offer of the delicacy and its acceptance was a bridge across cultures, a symbol of respect and friendship.

Here in Montreal, a lovely couple invited me, a newcomer, to their beautiful home. The hostess had earlier been to Marche Jean Talon and procured fresh food for the meal. She had also thoughtfully bought for me a particular food that I had once mentioned I had never eaten before. There on the balcony, in the soft evening light, over wine and beer, she placed plates of this food in front of us and showed me the unusual way of eating it. When I thought I’d finished eating I was told that within the remnants lay the best part of all – the heart. Then my host took my plate, helpfully cut up the core, speared something on a fork and handed it over to me.
“Here it is” he said, “Here is the heart”.
At that moment I remembered Antony Bourdain being given the seal's bloody eyeball. Because I was in Montreal I was given to eat an unusual flower with a heart in the centre, in another country erm, part of Quebec, I would have been offered something quite different. But whatever it was that was offered to me that evening, it was a beautiful gesture of friendship, a bridge between cultures and an invitation into a different world.

An excellent blog by a Montrealer >