My City

Here are three ATCs that I painted of my city, Hyderabad. I've been living here for nearly ten years now, and at first the city really got under my skin... it still does, but in the way of Lady Gaga's face implants. The old and the new are just randomly thrown together in my city, and very often people are in such a hurry to go on to their next ill-conceived building monstrosity that they leave the newly finished one just lying on the skyline, steel rods poking out like stiff umbilical cords that haven't been properly tied.

Here's a mess of buildings from the Old City. The old buildings belong to a hospital complex.

Right at the heart of the Old City, the Charminar. Constructed in 1591, it has become a symbol of Hyderabad.

And finally, the truly execrable Buddha statue plunked in the middle of Hussain Sagar, a lake dating back to the sixteenth century. You have to see it to believe how disproportionate its dimensions are. A good example of how one simply can't replicate the artistic style of a long-gone period. The statue's claim to fame is that it's been hewn out of one giant granite block, and that it first sank to the bottom of the lake taking with it all those involved in setting it up (1992). Or so the myth goes.