Exhibition for International Women's Day

There will be an exhibition of my archival, fine art prints from my book 

Is It The Same ForYou? 

on the 8th of March, which is International Women's Day, at the fabulous Bangalore International Centre

The show is in collaboration with Goethe Institut, Bangalore.

 Do come and take a look. 

I am pleased that BIC also invited me to do an illustration for their poster which has been so elegantly incorporated into the designs by Chandni Venkataraman.

Many thanks to Mr.T for enthusiastically inviting me to exhibit my work, connecting me to Max Mueller Bhavan and asking me to illustrate the theme for IWD. He is a long time reader of my blog :)

This is the original illustration that I did for the poster.

See you on Sunday, March 8th at BIC.

Drip Drip Drip of Violence

Some of us who have an awareness in varying degrees about the brutality of the pogrom happening in this country (I say some of us, because really, there is another half of people I know who have told me they really don't give a damn) are watching with incredulity, horror and mostly helplessness as situations get more severe and barbaric by the day. 

Some time last year, on a journalist's newsfeed, I read how the political party now in power, steadily incited violence against people of a particular religion. She described their tactic: never a full onslaught of violence but isolated incidents, one brutal assault here, another severe bashing up there, a barbaric rape somewhere faraway, the slow drip, drip, drip of violence random enough so that the rest of the country by and large remained complacent enough not to react so that inevitably now we fast forward into the full on barbarism that is playing out today. 

This drip drip drip technique seems the norm for a prelude to violence and it is violence in itself except that its randomness can seem innocuous until we view it in retrospect which is usually too late. These acts of violence can also happen person to person, friend to friend, always starting small: the tiny doses of unsolicited advice, the mocking of your mannerisms, the passive aggressive rejoinders; God forbid you react with anything other than good humour, you are told they are doing this because they are only teasing you, because they are comfortable with you; but there is no denying that it is violence all the same, the prelude to violence is a part of the violence, it is violence, because if it isn't stopped right there it escalates to the point where you are spat at rather than listened to, you are told your choices are wrong, your needs are negated, you get cut off mid sentence, and before you know it you are dismantled and effectively muzzled.

Also, if there is that one instrument which is used the way a savage would use a club, it is the mobile phone, that device which people use to score points and dehumanize each other. When you use the phone without regard to the other you dehumanize, you breach a basic norm of decency and when you do so it is an act of aggression. When you fail to recognize the humanity in another you reduce yourself to sub-human, even if only for a moment, and your descent during that moment is intentional whatever repugnant denial ("How dare you accuse me of savagery! I did this only because I was comfortable in your presence!) you, the perpetrator of violence may come up with.

You see it too in the small acts of everyday life, of the person who feels perfectly justified, of the person who doesn't know he's just committed harm, of the person who says something whose motives are clear to everyone but her, of the person who comes up with intricate rationales or just remains oblivious, of the person we've all been at one time or another. Taken to an extreme, it's the mind-set of murder; enlarged in scale it's war. Elaborate are the means to hide from yourself, the disassociations, projections, deceptions, forgettings, justifications, and other tools to detour around the obstruction of unbearable reality, the labyrinths in which we hide the minotaurs who have our faces.

~ Rebecca Solnit.
The Faraway Nearby

Illustrations made for Margaret Atwood's poem Secrecy.

Let this flood of women's stories never cease.

Arty Party

Since the model from the Life Drawing sessions was open to private posing, I invited some of my interested illustrator colleagues to my home along with the model. The difference was huge. 15 minutes per pose is a lot of time as opposed to 1 minute and 2 minute poses at the crowded life drawing sessions. The natural light at my home was at its best and the model, posing amidst the potted palms looked like a woman in a Gauguin painting.

Life drawing is difficult. You need to be given a firm foundation in art college, something which most of us do not get, and the one colleague of mine who made excellent drawings (with a felt pen that too) had some grounding at JJ School of Art. I was pleased that with just a few regular sessions of Life Drawing, my own figure drawing skills have improved, especially with the leisurely pace we were indulged with.

When illustrators get together to socialize, they need a "purpose", and drawing from life provided that. I guess it is the equivalent of a party theme. There was one exemplary 3 year old boy engrossed with his train set in one of the bedrooms. The other "boy" at the table was engrossed with his phone. He came and left with the model. There were salads and foccacia for lunch, but the serene superwoman mom of the 3 year old baked and brought the best New York Cheesecake ever. While all of us decided we must call a model over for private sittings like this again, I think we also (read I also) secretly hoped there would be cheesecake as an accompaniment every single time.

The Ancient City

Accidental Drawings

The drawing above, and the inadvertent image created by ink seeping through to the back of the paper.

Bodies in Ink

After seeing how well the participants at the Life Drawing sessions drew the human form, I too decided to make a frantic attempt at improvement. Somewhere I had bookmarked an article with photographs by Elizabeth Heyert where she photographs sleeping figures in the dark and projects them onto ruined walls in an abandoned town in Sicily. While her results are astonishing, I homed in on them as references for my drawings, seduced by the fact that these were everyday bodies in the nude and were therefore interesting to explore with ink.

My drawings at first in pencil were careful, I would fill in the parts of the anatomies that were obliterated by shadow in the reference photographs.  Then when I began filling in washes of ink, the ink would take over  from me leading my drawings into unexpected pathways resulting in surprising abstractions which I could never have envisaged. 

The textures that resulted were startling, the paper would lump up with the dampness and soak underneath creating a speckled surface and then dry out in shades of blue, grey, black and green which shown through the overall monochrome. The bodies became a result of abstract constructions of strokes, patches and bleeds out of which one could discern the human form suspended within a pool of black ink.  

What I liked a lot  was how the ink bled through on the other side of the page creating a shadow image. It was irresistible to take some diluted ink and fill in the hint of form that was created. This seemed to have a beauty of its own.

Some time in August last year, I sat in Brunton Boatyard and sketched the shore opposite. The drawing done in coloured pencils was rather laboured and did not have too much appeal. Now after ink from the adjoining pages seeped through, it lifted the drawing out of the mundane into something much more interesting.

All the drawings here were done in an old Nightingale sketchbook which is about the size of the palm of my hand, but today I grew bolder and decided to tackle one of the more complex images of a couple sleeping, in my large A3 Moleskine. I was surprised at how powerful the results are. 

I am glad to be able to shift to wet media after working with dry for so many decades. These experiments at getting acquainted are fun and remind me of how I enjoyed playing with charcoal years ago.

There are a few more drawings at Hello Every Sunday.

Life Drawing

Thanks to Instagram I got to know of @lifedrawingbangalore which meets every Sunday at Cubbon Park. Unlike the sketch club I used to attend some years ago, these are paid sessions and are therefore much more serious with 3 hours of non-stop intensive drawing of a live model. 

The people who attend are usually professionals from the animation, gaming and illustration industry, already highly skilled at figure drawing and who want to further hone their skills. 

This is great way to start a Sunday morning, it is in a sense a worship in a church. Instead of pillars, walls and arches you have trees and sky,  your interaction with your tools and media become your prayer, the model is the idol or the God, and for me, these sessions of drawing do what a church does not, it elevates my energy.

The model in these photographs is Roy who used to be my personal trainer for a while and gamely decided to pose for us when I told him about these sessions.

I cannot fathom the amount of stamina required to pose consistently for 3 entire hours, first in 1 and 2 minute poses and going on to 15 minute poses with very short breaks in between. Roy being a physical trainer used these poses to test his stamina and incorporate them into his training routine.

I wanted to hang out with men in six packs in my twenties. The powers of the universe have brought them into my energy field some 30 years later, but that is all right.

A visit to Tonique across the street with a friend after, to admire the masterful arrangement and buy some wine, Kaadu Rose in this case and Kahlua.

Some weeks earlier, for the first time ever in my life, I attended a life drawing class. It was wonderful to draw from a live, nude model as opposed to life drawing in art college where the watchman or the sweeper would be made to pose in a dhothi and sit in the same pose for a couple of hours. Here the 6 ft 2 inch tall model who is a professional model and a hypnotherapist to boot, knew not only how to pose but to vary his poses as well. His body language spoke of confidence and there was an aura of calmness about him. The examples below are some of the different styles of the same model done by all the participants. As you can see, all the drawings are very interesting interpretations and all very good.

I once taught drawing at an upmarket art college where an American visiting faculty offered to pose nude for my class of students. The person who ran the college forbade it. We have tried it before, I was told, it does not work. The model, a woman, was asked to wear a bikini. Only my students and I were allowed in the class. Male teachers were barred. When a couple of male lecturers came to do up the space, the tension on their faces was enormous with scowls and set jaws. The model was made to disrobe only after they left. 

In this nude session, the atmosphere was relaxed and fun. Soothing music played in the background. The young professionals who were drawing the model were a very dedicated bunch who drew very well as you can see, a far cry from my days as an art student at the local college where most of the female students in my class would ask the male students to draw for them.

After the session, I asked the model what he thought about when he posed silently for so long. The model Preeth, told me that he was a hypnotherapist so he knew how to train his mind to go blank during these sessions. It was therefore a kind of meditation for him.

Orecchio Acerbo

These are pictures of the cosy setting which constitutes the much respected Italian publisher of children's books called Orecchio Acerbo. My host in Rome and my "ex- close friend" is Author in Residence there; since the publisher is a close friend of his, he spends some months every year living in that building which is how I got to see inside.

You'd think I got to meet the publisher herself too but thanks to whatever kind of introduction my ex-close friend gave about me, I was told the publisher "didn't know what to say to me". I was so staggered by the stupidity of the reason, that I didn't pursue it further.

Contrast that with Montreal where my Quebecois  friends would introduce me to their close friends saying, "These are my friends and I hope they will be yours too".

I was once taken to a birthday party in Montreal where the host, a friend of a friend told me in her broken English that she didn't speak English very well, but I was welcome in her home. That was all she might have said to me, but at the party I was never for a moment made to feel alone and that evening will always remain one of my happier memories of Montreal.

In spite of all this, the setting of Orecchio Acerbo is beautiful, therefore it makes its way into my blog. Enjoy the pictures.

This is what structural racism looks like. It is not just about personal prejudice, but the collective effects of bias. It is the kind of racism that has the power to drastically affect people’s life chances. These highly educated, high-earning white men are very likely to be in positions that influence others’ lives – teaching, prosecuting, examining college applicants and hiring staff. They are almost certainly the kind of people who set workplace cultures.

They are unlikely to boast about their politics with colleagues or acquaintances because of the social stigma attached to holding racist views. Their racism is covert. It doesn’t reveal itself in spitting at strangers in the street. Instead, it lies in an apologetic smile while telling a non-white employee that they didn’t get the promotion. It manifests itself in a CV tossed in the bin because the applicant has a foreign-sounding name. Racism is woven into the fabric of our world. This demands a collective redefinition of what it means to be racist and what we must do to end it.

We must see who benefits from their race, who is affected by negative stereotyping of theirs, and on whom power and privilege is bestowed – not just because of their race, but also their class and gender. Seeing race is essential to changing the system.

~ Reni Eddo-Lodge