On the train to Matera

These are some drawings in my sketchbook of my train journey to Matera.

When I saw the Italian countryside landscape for the first time, I understood better what the old Renaissance masters had painted.  My usual bold charcoal drawings did not work very well for these landscapes. I felt it needed something softer and more poetic. Derwent graphite with its muted tones worked very well for the rolling hills and Olive trees. However I wanted to experiment with other media so I tried ink, my first foray into wet media.

My initial attempts at ink are reminiscent of how I use charcoal, my approach was the same, I let the fountain pen ink that I used literally gambol on different kinds of paper. It was pretty much hit and miss every time, some worked but most did not and there were many, many trials and errors for about two weeks (below). 

Then on a suggestion from a friend, I used a bottle of Sumi ink that had been gifted to me last year (one of those rare, thoughtful gifts that I could actually enjoy). I used tiny rectangles of cheap paper from a small notepad I had and strangely and much to my surprise it worked. The pictures had a print like quality to them which recreated the atmosphere that I wanted (below).

My long journey to Matera which began at 5 am went like this : Trastevere to Rome, Rome to Bari, Bari to Matera. Here are some of the sketches of my co passengers.

I felt compelled to redraw the sketch of the schoolgirl with red streaked hair and distinctive features into something larger. Her face reminded me of a Renaissance portrait. I think I should title the drawing of her as Sleeping Madonna (above).

While making these drawings I recall the sense of anticipation I felt sitting in the slow train which glided leisurely through the Olive groves and towards my destination.

There is a resumption of daily drawing over at Hello Every Sunday. We even have a brand new website with large images. Do meet us on Sundays to see our daily drawing progress at
HELLO EVERY SUNDAY.

A Woman's Worth

I am pleased to finally show off my cover illustration and design for the book, A Woman's Worth, a study of Indian women's bodies from conception to old age and death. Researched and written by Australian journalist Sophie Cousins and published by Yodapress in collaboration with SAGE, the first few chapters which were sent to me read like a Stephen King novel; but this was fact, not fiction, in this country a woman is ultimately a receptacle for breeding a male child, until she does so she is barely considered human.

I resorted to using an analogy which I thought was very apt to describe the situation in which an Indian woman finds herself: I represented a woman within a Pitcher plant to show that a woman's womb is made to kill that which it is supposed to nurture (female foeticide), in a sense much like the Pitcher plant itself. Alternately, the Pitcher plant in this cover illustration can also be a metaphor for Indian society which rather than giving a woman the freedom to grow, inevitably captures and destroys her through its societal norms.

Here is the initial conceptual sketch that I sent the client:

I have to add here that after two decades as an illustrator, I am pretty much given free reign to do what I want and that is when I do my best work. 

After approval, I developed the concept, which can be seen in the images below.

So the image above fell apart because of the lurid colour scheme, so I redid the drawing to the one below which is better.

The kind of paper I use and how it partners with the pastel and charcoal becomes very important in articulating what I want to say within the image.I wanted a darker quality to the image, striking as a book cover should be but with an undercurrent of unease as befits the subject that it is about. In the top image I have used Strathmore paper, in the bottom image I have used Rembrandt pastel on equally expensive Arches paper. Not only is the effect immediately striking, the feel of pastel on the surface of the paper is music to my hands. The process becomes enjoyable and when that happens the illustration turns out very well.

Then I scanned the image and using InDesign, I added the lettering and selected the right colours for the fonts. 

Below is the final cover illustration and design.

Here, I must express gratitude to some of my colleagues (you know who you are), for helping me decipher the mysterious measurements given to me and helping me navigate the pathways of InDesign, and to my friend sitting somewhere in the hills of Landour, for putting the author Sophie in touch with me for this excellent project, many, many thanks.

Well, another job done.

An Exercise in Restraint

 

This illustration for the latest issue of The Indian Quarterly was done by layering my drawings with Photoshop, the first time I have used digital assistance this extensively to create an image.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted my illustration to say, but apart from that, as I do with charcoal and pastel, I explored and found my way through while creating the illustration until I reached something satisfactory. I came away with the opinion that while making a digital collage such as this, it is so easy to get carried away by stuffing your composition with as many elements as possible and overcrowding your image. It seems to me that creating an effective illustration using Photoshop is ultimately an exercise in self-restraint – Does the image really need this? No? Then just remove it because the lesser the elements the better the image.

Initially I admit I got overexcited with all the different things I wanted to use – gold leaf, pressed flowers, dried leaves, Punjabi lettering, drawings, strokes of pastel, butterfly wings etc etc. I stuffed it all into the composition like I would a suitcase for a long journey and then seeing the weight and the sheer clutter, I was compelled to eliminate  the layers one by one by one.

Finally what makes this illustration effective apart from the symbolism of the elements is the way the eye moves around the composition, from the darkness towards the right bottom led by the black lettering  towards the stroke of red pastel on the left and upwards by the white lettering to the top of the rock and the house and then the birds and the inland letter onwards in the sky in the shape of an arc. All this ultimately reflects the words of the poignant essay about migration which I was given to illustrate, written by Anvita Budhraja, titled No Home but Memory. The essay was  based largely on a poem by Amrita Pritam called Mera Pata or My Address.

Here is the poem by Amrita Pritam

My Address

Today I effaced the number of my house and

The name of the street at the top of the street;

I removed the signposts of all the roads;

Even so if you must find where I am

You must knock at the door

Of every house in every street, city and country.

This is both a curse and benediction

Wherever you come across a liberated soul

You can take it to be my home.

Partition

you're kashmiri until they burn your home, take your orchards, stake a different flag,
until no one remembers the road that brings you back. you're indian until they draw a border through punjab, until the british captains spit paki as they sip your chai, add so much foam you can't taste home, you're seraki until your mouth fills with english, you're pakistani until your classmates ask what that is, then you're indian again or some kind of spanish, you speak a language until you don't, until you only recognize it between your auntie's lips, your father was fluent in four languages, you're illiterate in the tongues of your father, your grandfather wrote persian poetry on glasses, you can't remember, you made it up, someone lied, you're a daughter until they bury your mother, until you're not invited to your father's funeral, you're a virgin until you're too drunk, you're a muslim until you're not a virgin, you're pakistani until they start throwing acid, you're muslim until it's too dangerous, you're safe until you're alone, you're american until the towers fall, until there's a border on your back.

~ fatima asghar

Susanne Janssen

One day while browsing through the internet I came across an extraordinary illustrated version of Hansel and Gretel by an artist called Susanne Janssen; extraordinary because this version did not have the usual variations of gingerbread house and dense forests, rather, right from page 1 which opens out into a double spread of a wounded deer, the illustrations seemed cold and sharp and chilling, a terrifying psychological journey through hell and back to sanity. Also the unusual way the illustrations were made, bold collage, sharp angles,plunging diagonal compositions, red against black, said something about the confidence of the illustrator and her emphatic way of interpreting an old story in an entirely fresh new perspective. There is no room for frills and cuteness in her retelling, instead the visuals are suffused with an anxiety that we all recognize,one that is a part of living in this modern world.
I did what one does when one comes across a “find” on the internet, I bookmarked, I googled, I searched on Facebook for Susanne Janssen, I “friended” her. I am pleased to say that the illustrator reciprocated my enthusiasm of her work by appreciating mine.

Janssen’s illustrations for Hansel and Gretel however, did not leave me easily, I searched on Amazon for the book but could not find it,there are no English versions of the book either. I finally asked someone to get the book for me from abroad and I am glad I did.

For a better understanding of these images in Hansel and Gretel it is necessary to read this in depth analysis in Figure dei Libre. You will have to use Google Translate to read it but I guarantee you will come away completely fascinated.

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Some weeks ago, Susanne Janssen sent me some beautiful flyers that she had made for her print making workshops. It provided some balm for the fact that I couldn’t whizz across to attend these sessions. The images on the flyers are beautiful and while they are a different mood from Hansel and Gretel, they are equally powerful and entice me to return to them often. Here are some pictures.

Interview with Susanne Janssen

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Future Memories

My sister woke me early
that morning and told me
"Get up, you have to come see this
the ocean's filled with stars"
Delighted by the revelation
I dressed quickly and thought
If the ocean's filled with stars
I must take the first flight
and collect all of the fish from the sky.

~translated from Spanish by Eloisa Amezcua

Image from work in progress for an illustration which at this stage seemed apt for this poem.

Green

George

This is a drawing of one of the two people I know named George. There are certain remarkable similarities about both of them. They live in the Cantonment area, have long fraying grey hair and straggly beard, are misfits and are blessed with the "gift of the gab" - They have the ability to pass of their many failures as wisdom just by making their words do charming acrobatics like pierrots in a side show. 

This post is about the George who used to sit under a tree at DaCosta square where I used to go for my walks. I once asked him for a cutting of a creeper growing on his mango tree. He gave me the plant and said in hushed tones, eyes wide open as if he was handing me a magic wand, "These are cephalophytes!" I didn't engage him, I took the cuttings and scooted. What is a cephalophyte anyway, try Googling it.

One night George was sitting at his usual place and I took a hazy picture of him during my walk. In an attempt to engage me in conversation he asked to see the picture. "You compose very well" said George, "not a lot of people do that!" 

I think any woman who has lived long enough in India knows that when a man praises her it is more about him than about her. I had to wait for about 3 minutes and that inevitability happened. 

"I appreciate beauty" said George, "I am a lover of nature. That is why I can appreciate how nicely you've taken this photograph,see? I appreciate the curve of this tree trunk here, I appreciate the flowers overhead, see that dead tree? I watched it die!"
And then George said, "God speaks directly to me through these trees." I backed away and fled.

My story accompanying this picture could so easily have cast a benevolent light on the friendly neighbourhood eccentric, it could have been a story in Reader's Digest or a church magazine,or even a children's book, with a colourful illustration accompanying it, safe, non-committal,un-opinionated reinforcing in its gentle readers the goodness that they want this world to be about, Sweet George giving Priya a creeper and telling her that the trees spoke to him. But I am not a children's book maker and my one stint long ago with a church magazine committee left me with an eternal sense of horror.

But irrespective of my story, there is the fact that George makes a great composition sitting in the dark with the streetlight on him and his doggy friends scattered around. It took 4 hours non-stop to finish this in my Canson sketchbook and I am happy with it.


My childhood in a cult