The Mighty Oak

Because I had read about Oak trees in books from my childhood, written by English authors, I had often wondered about The Mighty Oak and wished I could see one in real. Once, an acquaintance gave me an acorn for my seedpod collection where it remained one of my most prized possessions for a long time (yes, an acorn). So it was with awe and delight that I set my eyes on my first Oak ever somewhere at Westmount. The cold autumn air had freeze dried the leaves of this tree so that they'd slowly lost their color and yet retained their shape in this magnificent creation.

And the leaves! One has to admire them and press them and draw them -

Needless to say, I now have a hell of a lot of Canadian acorns in my collection :)

Quotation seen on a coffee mug:
'Every mighty Oak was once a nut that stood its ground'.

Indian Summer

Be still my beating heart, these great trees are prayers.
~ R.Tagore

In Montreal, there are always a few days during the chilly autumn season when the sun suddenly shines and everything becomes unseasonably warm. Montrealers get very excited about it. I remember their eyes shone when they divulged that this was called an 'Indian Summer'. I have to admit I was rather bewildered both by the term and the excitement, but in retrospect, I understand why. 

Here of course, the Indian summer is endless as a Montreal winter and the blooming trees are like a continuous, spectacular firework display, one after the other, splashing the skies with orange,purple, yellow, pink and now bright red. The same time the flowers bloom is when the old leaves fall and almost immediately new light green ones grow. Spring,summer and autumn are all rolled into one grand, continuous Indian summer in this part of the world.

Montrealers truly appreciate the small slice of beautiful, intense summer handed to them, and they appreciate even more, the tidbit of Indian summer rationed out during autumn.Here we Benglureans partake in a gigantic endless banquet for the senses every year. We are overindulged by nature. For me, it took just one year of denial to come back and hurl myself at this feast with renewed enthusiasm.

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If I could read 100 Years of Solitude over and over again for the rest of my life while endlessly drinking cold Chocolate I would consider myself the happiest, most fulfilled person on earth.

Dark and Smoldering Goodness

In the last six months, deadlines have started appearing simultaneously, two, three at a time. This makes me nervous. My hands shake, I lose things, I drink too much coffee... The giant hi-res digital scanning machine where I get my large work scanned is now churning out bad results. I am glad I have the camera and thankfully in this country, good light in any season is never a problem.

While returning from the Scan man, I stopped to buy some Chinese food. While waiting, I wandered into a shop next door which sold Organic food. They had with them, the chocolate I was searching for – Earth Loaf chocolate. And there was only one left in the fridge.

In Toronto, my flatmate introduced me to Chocosol. If there is the equivalent of pure gold in chocolate, it is this. It is excellent, dark, organic chocolate. No sugar, no additives. It is so good that just one piece is enough to give you your chocolate fix for the entire day. The Toronto flatmate was a generous woman who not only gave me some Chocosol chocolate as a parting gift but also took me to the Distillery district and to the SOMA chocolate shop over there. I could only marvel at the chocolate because it was very expensive. However I did treat myself to a cup of chocolate with hints of orange, pepper and spices, which needless to say was heaven itself on earth within that cup.

                        SOMA hot chocolate. Photo by Danielle

Here, Earthloaf chocolate is as good as Chocosol (I can’t believe I am saying that). It is as obscenely priced but it is value for money. The one I bought is studded with this strange fruit called Gondhoraj which lifts the flavor of the chocolate. It is so so so good.The commercial variety we get, even in the good brands like Lindt are essentially candy. We end up eating a lot of it because we don’t get the chocolate fix we are looking for and instead derive our high from the sugar content within it.

In that Organic goods shop I also bought some extra dark Palm Jaggery (Molasses). The extra dark variety is hard to find. It is usually available in temple towns in coastal areas and friends who actually procure it for me during their travels have been known to suddenly change their minds when it comes to parting with it. The jaggery's smooth, dark, muted sweetness is as good as the chocolate but in its own way. It tastes almost like chocolate fudge but better.It is of course very different from organic powdered jaggery. I tried some Palm jaggery in my coffee and the deep, complex sweetness that resulted was very good.

 Why I am eulogizing these things so much? Because I firmly believe that strong coffee, excellent quality chocolate and rich jaggery is fuel and sustenance to an illustrator. The good things you imbibe, flows out into the picture you make and lifts it above the ordinary. With so much dark goodness in my system, my hands have stopped shaking, the answers I wanted have emerged on paper, I breathe easily and I am happy. The taste of dark chocolate, Palm jaggery and coffee lingers on... 

The Indian Witch Hunt

The Indian Witch Hunt

In spite of having put this up on Facebook where it got some 3000 hits and so many shares, one feels obliged to put up these pictures on the blog as well, since this is after all a platform for my work and there are a few regular readers I know who are not on Facebook.
The editor at Livemint sent me an email acknowledging that there were many, many queries and compliments for these illustrations. He certainly paired my style with the right story. The feedback actually encourages me to attempt a few more comics.Who would have thought that would happen?

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.

Trees in February

 In Bangalore on a summer evening.

In Montreal, during a winter afternoon.

Brought to Book

The Caravan, an excellent magazine of politics and culture invited me to do three editorial illustrations for them, super-fast, for an extraordinary essay about an author who had to face litigation for some of the contents in his book. He was hauled to the courts by people who hadn’t even read his book or deliberately chose to misunderstand what he had written. I had very little time to deliver something substantially complex for a story such as this. In the time I need to conceptualize and complete one illustration, I had to do three. But one does one’s best, takes a few by lanes and is thankful when such a project is completed and delivered.

In the illustrations I did for this essay, rather than creating standard visuals with courtroom scenes, I chose instead to depict the overwhelming emotions of paranoia, bewilderment and frustration that the author was consumed by; how small and vulnerable one can feel while battling strange and terrifying forces in an unfamiliar world. 

Blue and Green

In Bangalore and Montreal.

Favourite Things

An Exercise in Curiosity

 There is a lot of difference while working on large sheets of paper with charcoal and when working on smaller squares of paper and graphite. While working with charcoal, I am standing at my desk, exerting pressure and practically hurling my entire body onto the paper, cutting, tearing, blending, coaxing...The complete opposite seems to be the state that I am in while completing these 13 illustrations for a story about barbaric Witch Hunts in India.I have posted two other illustrations for these in the previous post as well. 
While drawing these I have been seated at all times during the last two weeks in the same position and the only movement has been my wrist as it builds up layer upon layer of graphite on textured paper (Cretacolor 6B graphite on 180gsm precut Canson). The only sound is the kich kich kich kich as the lead moves while shading yet another area.

I took on this graphic novel kind of short story for The Big Picture in Mint, out of curiosity, to see whether I could do this, if I liked doing it and if I had the patience. This platform is a great one for amateur illustrators and writers and I only wish I had had something like this to work on in my early years as an illustrator. However for professional illustrators this is a wonderful way to try out and experiment with what they have never tried before as I am doing now. I directly began the fair work without rough sketches or planning because you are compelled to work at a fast pace. In this case unlike the highly professional editorial illustrations that I do which involves so much thought, planning and conceptualizing, a completely different mindset is required. It seems that here the illustrator is a tool rather than a voice.

Will I attempt this again? I am not sure. I find sitting chained to my desk for lengthy amounts of time exhausting and frustrating. Also, there is not much if any thinking at all for the illustrator because you are told what to draw. I found the trite visual interpretations given to me tiresome and while I did what was wanted of me for some of them, I also did what I wanted for others. If I do attempt something like this once more, the story will have to be a very good one. However I must say this, doing this has left me with nothing but admiration for illustrators of graphic novels, their patience and tenacity is to be lauded.

Outside, the Bangalore winter results in cloudy weather and beautiful diffused sunlight in which I took the first three pictures at my desk. Naturally my thoughts go back to last year especially when I see blog posts of friends in the midst of winter. Some of the pictures are beautiful, like this post from The Cassandra Pages and these haunting and moody pictures from the same blog.  Winter can be beautiful when you are looking at it in photographs.
But when I look at my own pictures like the one above (this is a color picture btw), I am reminded of how I removed my gloves, quickly took a picture and quickly, quickly put the glove back on again over my freezing hand at -20 degrees in Montreal last year beside the St. Lawrence river. Immigrating to Montreal too was an exercise I took (a mega exercise perhaps) to satiate my curiosity and yet again, I wonder how I ever did it all.

The Indian Witch Hunt