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.

Awkward Love

Really crazy swap. Here are my ATCs, done as cartoons. Impossible not to use double entendre for such a topic, and that's just what a lot of us did.

All of them were done with watercolour pencils and here and there a bit of regular watercolours. The last one was a great hit with everybody.

I Love Klimt

This was the name of the swap on Illustrated ATCs that took place earlier in the year. Yes, I love Klimt too. All the glitter and the sensuousness can be quite heady. We could interpret Klimt any way we wanted, straight copies (quite difficult to do on such a small scale) or 'Klimt-style' as they put it. Here are my paintings.

Adele as an Indian socialite. It was her haircut that  really fascinated me, and I just extended that bob into a bun.

One of the ladies, and one of the fish, from Goldfish. Delicious or what?

I love Klimt's Hope. This is another Indianised version.

And, finally, I 'Klimted' good old Gustave himself.

All in all, great fun with watercolours and iridescent paints. ATC sized, all of them.

A Really Long Time!

I see that I haven't uploaded anything in quite a while. Have been working on my art, though. Let me put up this fortune teller first of all. The reference was from my student and friend Rhoda Alex's photograph. I like the way he's touching up his signboard.

He was done in watercolours, with some white and black ink squiggles. ATC size. I need to send him off to another artist in another country. That's where I've really fallen behind, getting my paintings off to the destinations they should have been in by now. May and June were bad months, when Life decided to do a donkey act, kicking at me randomly, repeatedly, and sometimes viciously.

Heads

An art-historian friend of mine gave me a stack of cards measuring 13x18 cm. They're rather interesting to work on, because the thin paper that's stuck on them is very absorbent. Just touch the brush to it and I swear you can hear it go SSHHHLOOOOP as it sucks in the paint. I thought I'd paint these quick heads... just features and expressions straight from the brush.

All Sort of Windows

More postcard-sized watercolours on handmade paper. These pooches going on a drive were done from emdot's photograph on Flickr.

I painted these brushes in a milk-jug from 1Happysnapper's Flickr upload.

Here's the greatest erection any man ever got up for a woman, the Tajmahal, seen from the Red Fort in Agra, where Shahjahan spent his final years in imprisonment. This is the view of the Taj I like the best, and I always wonder how it must have felt for a king to view his creation from prison. Thanks to rednivaram for the reference.

Another Islamic window, this time from the Charminar in my city. This was painted from a photograph I took when I went on a photo-walk with the Hyderabad Photography Society. The burqa clad girl in the picture actually ran back to the window and briefly opened her veil for me to photograph her.

From elNico's photograph on Flickr, this one shows a sunset bringing back some dreary windows to life.

This time the colours are more or less true to the paintings, but these images are not clear at all. I have to get me a scanner, a refrain I've been whining for awhile now.

Travel Windows

The 'new' exchange at WetCanvas is getting old, and I still have many more windows to paint. I thought I might do a little cut-and-paste, taking out pictures from my journal and sticking them on postcards. Here are four pictures that I'm thinking of cutting up.

This first one shows the view from my sixth floor window at Hotel avenue Regent in Kochi. It looks better than it does here, but unfortunately it takes up all of the page, and cutting it to postcard size would mean leaving out the drapery or the sunlight on the wooden floor. Let's see what can be done...

This one is the scene through the windshield of a Meru Cab, with the driver frowning in concentration as he makes his way through the chaotic traffic of my city. No problems with cutting this one to size.

Here's one of a plane seen through the large windows at Kochi airport. I always reach there much ahead of time, and always draw the scene outside. I have more aeroplanes, and am thinking of painting window frames on them.

Here's my favourite, that I'm finding very hard to tear out from my journal. Kochi airport again, with this little French boy looking out the window.

All of them are on handmade paper which has a generous sprinkling of dried petals. I used my Gioconda charcoal pencil, watercolours, and my trusty Sakura brush pen that gets past all airport security. 

The Pretty Town of Winchester

I went to visit Dinah in Winchester, a really pretty place, with the houses straight out of Dennis the Menace or Archie's Riverdale: made of wood, set in open yards, kiddie toys and Halloween corn dollies left outside. Fall must have been spectacular, because the town is bordered by woods. The occasional little red-clothed tree, like this one, was beautiful enough for me, though I do wish I could have made it to Winchester in the Fall.

The day after Thanksgiving was a day misted by rain. Dinah and I walked through the town, just catching up on things. Also, taking photographs to paint from. This painting has come out better than it appears here... looks like my scanner is once again settling in for a long sulk.

Friends Abroad

One of the reasons why I loved my New York trip so much was because of the friends who gave me such a good time. Here are three of them, painted without any preliminary pencil lines,

I met Shekhar for the first time outside the UN building where he works. I was taking him a package of cigarettes from India, given to me by his brother who is my close friend. Now this is not exactly how Shekhar looks... call it a close likeness, except for that strange right eye I've given him.

This is my friend Dinah, who lives in Winchester these days. We've been friends for decades now, but she no longer lives in India. She took time out to visit me in Manhattan, though this painting shows her in her kitchen. Painted from a photograph I took when I went to her place for a day.

And here's my virtual pal turned real-life friend, Joan. Joan made a long trip to Manhattan THREE times, just to meet up with me and take me out. Her amazing Paris sketch book inspired me to start a New York sketch diary.

Art on the City Streets

One of the things I loved about New York was the way there was art everywhere. Coming from a country where all public spaces are reserved for unwanted statues of politicians, dead or alive, it took my breath away to see these.

The Wall Street Bull, or the Bowling Green Bull as he is also sometimes called, is a 3,200 kg bronze sculpture by Arturo di Modica, put up in December 1989. I learnt much later, after I came home to India and Wikied information on this bronze beast, that people stroke his horns, nose and cojones because they believe it will bring them financial luck. I did see one young chap crouched beneath those awesome orbs, and thought that he was a pervert. Ah, if only I'd known then what I know now...

LOVE, on 6th Avenue, was designed first for a Christmas card by Robert Indiana in 1964. A couple of years later, he put it up as a sculpture. It's made of stainless steel, and the sides are blue. You can spend quite some time gazing at it, with children climbing up and tumbling through the base of the letters.

Seems it later became one of those iconic and much-copied images. No wonder it seemed as if I was meeting somebody I already had seen somewhere.

A New York Scramble Into the New Year

Can't let the first month of the new year slide by. After many moons, here is a fresh entry. I was in New York for more than a month in November-December last year. Shiv and I stayed in an apartment in Jersey City the first ten days. This is a picture of JC from the Hudson when I went to see the Statue of Liberty. I painted this on Lokta paper after I came home, and then stuck the painting into my moleskine.

Here's the Lady herself, strong-armed and somehow... sad.

Nothing sad about this view out the window at a Spanish cafe in Jersey, where I sat and marvelled at the raining yet sanguinary world outside while waiting for my bowl of soup-of-the-day.

Fida

SAHMET is organising an exhibition of 8"x10" paintings by artists known and unknown. This is for M.F. Hussain, whose 94th birthday is on the 17th of September. I got to know of this very late, but just had to paint something because I love M.F. Hussain.

I thought I'd mimic his way of abstracting personality through details of dress or appearance, minus the features. Therefore the white hair, and the glasses. Then, I wanted to bring in his film poster painting. Finally, I thought I'd put in these lyrics because they capture exactly what I feel very often: Ik khwab se dekha hoon, tabeer nahin banti... tasveer nahin banti. (I keep trying to paint a picture, and the picture doesn't get painted. I have this vision, but it refuses to be put down on paper.)

For Hussain, in exile in a faraway country, with love.

Celestial Critters

I love the ideas people come up with for swap-themes. This one was about "animal guides/power animals". I thought that mooshikan would fit the description: just think of the poor fellow having to carry that elephant-headed tub of motichoor laddus about. Then I thought, hey, let me do the vahanas of the gods and goddesses. I wrote the slokas with my Micron pen, and the pictures are watercolours. Couldn't find a good sloka for Yama's buffalo, though. The elephant is supposed to be Airavat, by the way. The first case of a white mammal growing colourful in his old age.

I, Me, Myself

Here are some self-portraits I did recently. Watercolours on handmade paper, the first from an old photograph of how I used to be fifteen years ago, and the other two painted from the mirror. They were both painted at the same table, lit by the same window, just a couple of days apart. I swear. Maybe the brown portrait is the true one, because it shows my inner self: a self well-hidden under ten extra kilos.

Peter Max Inspired

I discovered Peter Max through this swap in his honour. Most of Max's bright and colourful work was evidently done in the 70s and 80s. Maybe Max' childhood in Shangai was what whooshed his work with colour. He uses lots and lots of pure colour; no blending, no mixing, absolutely no limits on the palette.

Here are my paintings, all in watercolour. I was apologetic about them being in watercolour and therefore not quite as bright as these photos show them to be... the max that wasn't possible, was the way I put it, and I love my dreadful pun, so there. However, after looking at some of the artist's watercolour work, I think I haven't done too badly with the colour. Only acrylics could be really truly gaudy.

Leafloat

Lotsapotsaluv (Yesssssss!!!)

The Oranges Swimming

Monochromatic Women

I could have gone on painting more of these women, but I've got to catch the deadline. All of these are watercolours. The green one is a bit of an experiment. The sepia lady has gone through innumerable versions: I just love the solid seated firgure in a sari. Always have. The red one is copied from a sketch by William Frost. The blue girl is my favourite.

Say, any of you ladies and gentlemen willing to pose in the buff for me?