Re emergence after a Sabbatical

These pictures below a keyhole peek at Unbox Festival where I was not only a flâneur but also a participant.
You can interpret the pictures however you want. Whatever meaning you derive from them will stem from an intersection of your instinct with your creative desires ~

And my studio, again. I suspect I am a bit in awe of this space which it seems my efforts in collaboration with my energy field have generated.

A Bangalore Montreal Dialogue

Every Sunday, Julie and I upload all the drawings that we do that week on a tumblog called Hello Every Sunday. You've seen the icon on the left and yes, Facebook readers already know, but since I love my blog I must put it here as well.
Over here in the about section you can read why we do what we do. 

Otherwise do follow us and cheer us on as we drive this little monster forward every week throughout this year.

The top and bottom pictures of the first four photographs are mine, and the pictures in the middle are Julie's. See the difference in lighting of the two countries - the golden winter light from South India and the blue winter light from snowy Quebec.

Here are pictures of the sketchbooks that we are using and that we arrived at by trial and error -
This is the sleek sophisticated fancy Stillman and Birn which Julie decided would meet her needs.

And the bright and chubby Lekka Pustaka (account book) which dazzled me with its red shirt and swore to fulfill all my desires.

When I look at how different the sketchbooks are from each other, I cannot help but think of all the opposites in this project: The cultural differences in the two countries, the different colors of the light, the opposites in temperatures, the fact that we drink tea and coffee respectively, Julie's systematic way of working and my last minute jams... Still, art communicates through all kinds of differences and boundaries. I am sure that towards the end of this project we both will carry away with us a lot more than we ever expected when we started this.

Drawing Daily

I don't SKETCH from life as regularly as I used to and that was bothering me because I believe regular sketching is as important as practicing scales on the piano. It HONES your skills tremendously. Sometime ago another artist Rick Beerhorst, who makes very beautiful work, spoke about how he planned to do 5 drawings every single day. This is easier said than done. There is always something SEEMINGLY MORE IMPORTANT that beckons, especially when running a house (I have to buy eggs!) and there is the eternal lure of the internet. Nobody understands the tremendous amount of SELF DISCIPLINE it takes to be self-employed. But once you start drawing, simply drawing, everything else falls away. Even deadlines can wait. Drawing is a form of meditation.

I am using ordinary sketchbooks here and drawing with the local Sudha brand of charcoal. It makes me less self-conscious about the drawing so I have more fun. If I use my special Canson sketchbook or more special Moleskine sketchbook, I still have fun because the paper is so wonderful to work on, but there is the grim determination at the back of my mind that every single drawing should be a frikking masterpiece. That can sometimes become a problem when you want to try and push your drawing skills further, so for my 5 3 drawings a day exercise it is these Chinese sketchbooks that I do them in. The paper is good enough and the books look nice. If I manage to keep at my daily drawing, I will have done some 90 drawings by the end of this month, maybe more, and hopefully one day I can just whip out human figures with far more ease than I can now.

To Keep on Drawing

I simply love my Canson sketchbook. All the dry mediums - pastel, charcoal, coloured pencils work wonderfully in it and the feel of the medium on the paper makes me want to keep on drawing endlessly. Some of these pictures are taken from instagram feeds I follow where when I've liked a picture, I borrow the subject and end up making it my own by experimenting in my sketchbook. Most of these are explorations of shape and texture and colour, but hopefully in up coming blog posts, I'll have something more conceptual to show.

I've probably added this quote below in an earlier blog post, but I'd like to include it here again, more as a reminder to myself about how important it is to simply keep on drawing ~

If I had a single piece of advice to offer to any artist, it would be this: whatever your practice or medium, draw constantly. Be like the dancer, who never lets a day go past without a class. Draw as much as you can, wherever you can. Draw from observation (of course) but draw for practice too, from memory or from imagination, mark-making for precision or beauty-of-line alone, regardless of subject or likeness. Draw with pencil, with nibbed-pen, with charcoal or crayon or Conté pencil or biro. Draw with brushes and inks, or twigs dipped in watercolour or with old toothbrushes or the tips of feathers. Draw with anything. Subvert habit with new experience. Drawing can be for recording, but more than that it’s an expressive form that can be endlessly reinvented. Keep project-books and work at them even when the spirit doesn’t move you. Work in them out of discipline and respect for your art-form. They’re money in the bank for later, when you need the inspiration stored in them. Draw. Draw again. Never stop drawing.

Drawing is life.

~ Clive Hicks-Jenkins

A Sunday Expedition

During the beginning of this year I plodded through the snow in a forest in Quebec, now somewhere at the end of the same year I plodded through a tropical jungle. Last year I helped hunt mushrooms on the ground, this year I focused a pair of binoculars towards birds up on the trees. All these adventures are due to the many strange, unusual and interesting people who come my way. The latest adventure is thanks to my new neighbours who are not just bird watchers but avid sketchers as well.What's more, they are coffee drinkers too. One of them is an illustrator and the other is an animator. 

 We went over to Banerghatta National Park on Sunday, very early in the morning, to do some bird watching. Since it was so early in the day, the many names of the birds did not register in my head but from what I remember in the jumble, it went something like bee eater, flycatcher,drongo, paradise bird, red bulbul, bee catcher, honey sucker... But some of the birds I saw were supposed to be rare and all of them were very colourful and pretty.We heard lions roaring in the distance, then a park keeper came and shooed us away because there were wild elephants roaming freely somewhere there. We saw elephant dung on the way back.

I am a ground watcher, at least that is what I can photograph

Then the inevitable Chai break since Chai is better than Coffee in these small stalls that serve them. I did not try the cake.

Then we went to the zoo which was rather sad. The animals and birds were moth eaten and forlorn but we sketched them anyway and much to my relief I found out that I could still sketch even though I have not being doing it as regularly. The bright and clashing colours of clothes that people wore contrasted greatly against the captive animals and made me want to photograph them up close, but I settled for distance.

 A signboard asking you to keep your distance lest the caged, chained, listless, colourless animals viciously attack you.

The sketches
These are the animator's sketches - 

 These are the illustrator's sketches

And these are some of my sketches below which are done with a water soluble graphite pencil  -

I have to add here, a picture of my foldable, made in China sketching stool -

We finished the morning with a fabulous feast at the Bengali Bhojohri Manna.You have to pause a good day with filter coffee so we did. There were other adventures too, but I will stop talking about them here.

And add just one more picture of a lovely gift I received here

The illustrator

The animator

Montreal Sky and Bangalore Color

One early morning sometime at 6am, I ventured outside during a Montreal winter to catch a bus to Sutton. Around me, the world was a desaturation of black, white and grey. And then I looked up and saw the sky. It was this shade of intense blue, the colour I would use as a child to colour in a night sky but while thinking that skies did not really exist in this colour and I was using this shade of blue because it was the darkest blue in my box of crayons. But here it was, that impossible blue as the real thing contrasting against strange shapes in a monochrome world. An hour later, the sky turned grey, then dirty white and everything looked bleak once more.

And then Bangalore where the brightest of bright colours clash and jostle with each other. Montrealers will wonder what the heck I’ve drawn above while Bangaloreans will instantly recognize a Bangalore sky in October - bright orange of African tulip flowers set amidst leaves that are so dark green they are almost black. Rows and rows of them emphatically making their presence felt against a bright turquoise sky.

At an Art supply store in Queen street in Toronto I saw giant bullet-shaped sticks of Senelier oil-pastel obscenely priced at nine dollars each. Here, an artist down the street has an entire box of them in different shades of red which I was generously allowed to use. 

And this beautiful woman standing with confidence in her Sunday best. I quickly hurried home and drew her in her stunning attire.

Letting Go

There is something scary about letting ourselves go. It means that we will screw up, that we will relinquish the possibility of perfection. It means that we will say things we didn’t mean to say and express feelings we can’t explain. It means that we will be onstage and not have complete control, that we won’t know what we’re going to play until we begin, until the bow is drawn across the strings. While this spontaneous method might be frightening, it’s also an extremely valuable source of creativity. The lesson about letting go is that we contain our own creativity. We are so worried about playing the wrong note or saying the wrong thing that we end up with nothing at all.

~ Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works

When I read a quotation like this, I cannot help thinking how beautifully the author talks about the process of letting go, how well it is put into words and how good it is to read it; somewhere someone else has gone through something that is similar to what I am struggling with. Yet the frustrations, dilemmas and emotions that actually accompany the process of letting go of an outcome can be terrifying and confusing. When I took that leap full of faith and hope and as much research as possible into Montreal, as careful as I was,I inched forward for a while and finally crash landed into a mountain of dirty brown snow and sank down into the bottom. Now I am simply going through the motions of desperately crawling out. As another wise man once said, ‘it is easier to be philosophic when things are going well’. Indeed it most definitely is.

These are scenes from this year's Montreal winter. It was the coldest and worst winter since 1889. After four months of bitter cold, it is still snowing outside; giant trucks carry loads of snow outside the city which they pump into enormous white mountains; I am still wearing my Canada Goose; I still experience acute homesickness when I see pictures of flowering trees from a Bangalore summer. As a newcomer, I feel I am running through an endless labyrinth which leads nowhere... It is excruciatingly difficult to be an immigrant during a recession and a soul-killing winter, alone in a foreign city which speaks a language other than what I am fluent in.

But to try and end this post on a positive note, before I came to this city, I corresponded with an artist who wrote me these words that I've never forgotten: ‘The warmth of the people makes up for the cold temperatures...’ How much those words ring true over and over. If there is just one redeeming feature about Montreal and its endless winter, it is the kindness of the Montrealers and the warm friendships I have made here. It reminds me that there were other seasons too and that I still have memories of Montreal that look like this - 

But while the fleeting summer and autumn in Montreal were ephemeral, it is the winter that is eternal and so my drawings of Montreal will always be of bare branches and snow ~

Immigrant Journals