Saturday, August 1, 2020

Returning to My Art Blog

It is two years since I posted anything here. When I look back to see the reasons why, I can't see any. I leave it there.

I plan to post my works consistently from now on. 

Let me start with this:

I have made quite a few portraits of scientists. Some of my artist and other friends call it my scientific portrait series. Some friends active in popularisation of science conducted a theatre festival with Kannada plays based on scientific themes - such as the lives of Srinivasa Ramanujam, Leise Meitner, S Chandrasekhar, Brecht's life of Galileo in Kannada, and so on. They invited me to display the portraits I have made, during the festival. That was a very pleasant thing to do. I am grateful to them for the opportunity.

I post the latest in the series first - a portrait of the Indian statistician and polymath, D D Kosambi, done to honour him on his 113th birth anniversary, on 31 July, 2020 and add the others afterwards.



What follows are some of the pictures exhibited during the theatre festival with the name of the scientist linked to a Wikipedia page and the medium.


Fountain pen





Digital - Procreate on iPadPro

I had always wondered - do we really know if Galileo looked like this. Then I found that the reference to my work was a portrait by Justus Sustermans - A Dutch painter. Perhaps, Galileo really looked like this!




Pencil on scrap paper!






A pencil portrait of my father - who was a professor of chemistry in the University of Mysore, a writer of popular science in Kannada. He had also translated Bertolt Brecht's play the Life of Galileo to Kannada (With H K Ramachandramurthy) and it has been staged hundred times or more.






Fountain pen


Fountain pen







Fountain pen

Thursday, November 1, 2018

Inktober 2018

Inktober is an annual worldwide event for enthusiasts who love to draw in ink. Draw is just a way of saying it. Creating art would be abetter way to put it.

This is the third year of my participation in it and I am already looking forward to the next year!

You can know more about Inktober, it HERE

I drew the pictures below. I have uploaded them in random order and not chronologically. I first give the prompt for each one of them and then explain what prompted me to draw the particular picture. In other words. my interpretation of the prompt.






Swollen: Swollen head, swollen ego. 



Bottle. What better bottle than a bottle of Ink, for inktober?




Muddy. Rice seedlings have to be transplanted into paddies.  It is not only backbreaking work but also your hands and legs are muddy. Paying tribute to the labour which puts rice in our plates. 


Expensive: The horn of the Rhino is expensive. It proves so expensive that rhinos pay with their lives.






Roasted: A very common roadside scene in India. Roasted peanuts. This is the equipment used to roast them, An iron pan, sand in which the nuts are roasted, and a kerosene stove with a pump on
























Spell: Abbé Faria casting a hypnotic spell on a patient (not in picture). Based on a statue of him in Panaji, Goa, India. When I first saw it in 1980, it cast a spell on me - of fascination that such a stature exists.



 Chicken: Self explanatory.






































Drooling: The Mask (Movie) drooling at a dancer. 












Exhasuted: A different take on an old advertisement for Heineken beer, by David Ogilvy. It showed an empty bottle and a full glass. Here the beer is exhausted.



Star: Star Scientist - pun intended. His words, "we are all start dust"fascinates me.




Precious: Self explanatory?










Flowing: 







Dolphin:


Guarded: Chandamama was a children's magazine with many stories. In many stories, there would be a treasure hidden somewhere but is guarded by a fearsome snake - invariably a cobra. This is a flash back to those days.





Clock: Shortage of time (!!) after a long day lead me to this simple interpretation of the prompt.



Angular.













Scorched: The state of things to come for the world?








 Stretch




















Lightning: Zeus, the Norse god of, what else! Based on pictures of a statue in Stockholm. 
















 Gift:  A gift of this perfume would be a gift of Gift - because, in German language Gift means poison.










Double: I had seen a movie long ago (1970) of a Japanese master paint with two brushes in his fingers. So stuck to 00 brushes on to a separator to paint Gemini. 




Slice: A backhand slice in Tennis - a game I love, never having held a racket in my hand!



Monday, March 19, 2018

The Gallows

Old buildings move me and draw me to draw them.

The gallows in the cellular jail moved me - not its form or colour or texture or architecture - but the story behind it, the story of India's struggle for independence in particular and the struggle against colonialism and imperialism in general, the story of heroic young men whose life was cut short by disease, hard labour and a hangman's noose.

Some of what I felt when I saw the gallows is below and an image of the hateful building drawn in pencils and digitally altered.























Did the architect seek beauty and balance?
Or only purpose and efficiency?
Did it touch him that a man climbing up those steps
Would KNOW that he would never climb down?

Did the mason, who builds for the living,
Feel that this was for death?
Did the rain blacken the roof or
Was it death that painted it black?

Did the burning desire for freedom
Burn the fear of death too?
Did the hangman see his brethren
Or did he sell his soul and his eyes?

Did the criminal who called a hero
A criminal and ordered his death
Snuff his conscience 'cos he knew
He was killing a nobler being?

Did the first man that this structure took
Break his back to break the rock
To lay the base for the scaffold
That would one day blow the candle of his life?

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Blame




Once in a while, a thought starts appearing in my mind already in the form of a verse or poem. I develop it later into what can be called a poem - if you are generous. This usually happens either in Kannada or in English, more often, the former.

Vincent van Gogh, an artist whom I admire instinctively, is oft-quoted. His opinions and remarks on art are revealing.

"..... But still one ought to try, however incompetent one may feel before the unspeakable perfection and radiant splendour of nature", he said.

I was once sketching a portrait or something and the results were unsatisfactory, to put it mildly, and I remembered Vincent.

And within a short time, a thought started forming in my mind and I was astonished that it was in Hindustani. My knowledge of that language is sketchy, at best, and as for a true South Indian, gender is the first victim when I speak. 

I continued to have some fun processing that poem in Hindi. I hesitantly submitted that poem to my brother-in-law, Nagraj Rao, who corrected some words and added an appropriate one in one place. He made sure that not everything had the same gender, and hence often wrong.

Here is the result.

                 तस्वीर बनाने लायक दुनिया बनाके
                 तस्वीर बनानेका  शौक बंदे के दिल मे  जगाके
                 तस्वीर बनाने की लियाक़त बंदे से छुपाके
                 बंदे का मज़ाक उडाते हो?

                 वाह रे खुदा, यही है तेरी खुदायी?
                 वाह रे खुदा, यही है तेरी खुदायी?




Monday, March 5, 2018

Memories




I was a scout. A cub, to be precise. My scout troop planned a camp. My father was apprehensive about sending me. I was not even nine yet. The man in charge of the troop came home and persuaded my father. It was one of the most thrilling moments of my then short life and it has remained the same to this day.

The camp was at Byadarahalli. It is just 30 km away from Mysore by rail. Next to the railway track is a hillock and we camped there.

On the second day of the camp, the senior scouts, the Rovers, went on a hike. They were expected to return before nightfall. We were all tense as darkness fell and no sign of them. We were all looking westward periodically, the general direction of their return. In those days there was no electricity in any surrounding villages and it was pitch dark. After what appeared to be an interminable wait, we saw flashes of light from a torch which transmitted the message "we are safe" in Morse code.

Eventually, they came.  With not even a radio at our disposal, we were completely cut off from civilisation. They returning rovers had bad news.

It was the 27th of May, 1964. Nehru was no more. A pall of gloom fell on the camp. 

The next day, we hoisted the scout flag at half mast. Observed a minute of silence. And we went about other scouting activities.

Whenever I travel by train between Mysore and Bangalore, I eagerly wait for this station. The hillock and the small traveller's bungalow on top bring back memories of that memorable day. 




Friday, November 3, 2017

Inktober 2017

Like last year, I took part in the worldwide event Inktober 2017. This was started by Jake Parker and you can read about it here.

I chose to post my works on Instagram and a private group on Facebook, dedicated to drawing every day.

Last year, I drew whatever caught my fancy and ignored  Inktober's official prompt list as I thought that it was too restrictive.  This year, however, I decided to stick to the prompt list as a challenge. It turned out to be an exercise in lateral thinking and I surprised myself and thoroughly enjoyed the process of first interpreting the word and then creating a visual to represent it. I often rejected the first word associations and dug deep into my memories and, dare I say, imagination to decide what to draw. 

The tools I used were fountain pens, brushes, ink - diluted or otherwise, pigment markers for creating different effects. I used Camlin and Parker inks as they exhibit different colours when diluted - revealing how their blacks were composed.

I have posted here all the pictures I drew and some notes about them - almost as a diary. 

Since these pictures were meant to be viewed on a mobile phone, essentially, I have restricted their size here too. It also helps reduce some blemishes in drawing and finishing - which I left in the pictures, knowingly.

I do hope you enjoy them. The word with which the notes start is the prompt word for the day.




1 Swift: Jonathan Swift - the author of Gulliver's Travels. I did not want to draw the immediate word associations such as the car of that name, the bird, anything moving swiftly. After a lot of thought, off and on, over the day, Swift popped up and here he is!





 








2. Divided: A little girl whose hair is divided into two ponytails.





















3. Poison: I drew Socrates receiving the cup containing the poison - Hemlock. I drew it with the painting by David - a painting I love - as reference. 

















4. Underwater: I have a strange aversion to underwater creatures! I do eat fish though. I decided to play with the word and made it under water. I drew the word Inktober seen under a drop of water. And played visually with the word Inktober under the word water.








 5. Long: I was stuck with the meaning of long in a three dimensional world. A friend brought in the fourth temporal dimension. So the legend on the picture reads "A watched kettle never boils. Never is a long time indeed".

















6. Sword: The most direct visualisation. The sword of Tipu Sultan.








7. Shy: During my active bird watching days. I was always amused by writers referring to some birds as shy. The Indian Koel is one of them. The Koel female, which looks so different from the male which looks like an elongated crow is hardly ever seen in the open. Flying, not too elegantly, from tree to tree  without coming into the open. 











8: Crooked I tried to paint the image in my mind from the days of reading "Chandamama" - full of delightful cock and bull stories. Many stories had a crooked and scary tamarind tree - the dwellings of ghosts, banshees and white clad Mohinis.














9: Screech: A speeding snail comes to a screeching halt as its path is crossed by a speeding centipede and exclaims haughtily, with dismay, "What is the big hurry, huh!?" 









10 Gigantic: The Word giant is derived from Latin word gigas. In German a giant is still a Gigant. So, I drew Mahishasura, after whom Mysore is named. But who am I to say who it is in the picture! So, if you have a favourite giant, it is he.








11. Run: The very idea of running brings up the names of the gods of middle and long distance running to my mind. Abebe Bikila, Emil Zatopek, Lasse Viren, Pavo Nurmi . . . Zatopek - "the flying Czech", "the Grimacing Czech", "the human locomotive", who ran a marathon for the very first time of his life in an Olympics and, hold your breath - won it, has always been my favourite.



"





12. Shattered: Busy with work, late in the evening, I had no idea what to draw. The shattered thigh of duryodhanana oorubhanga by Bhaasa? glass shattered? shattering news? Shattered mind? No time, no energy, no ideas. I was shattered. A quick selfie and here it is.













 13.Teeming: Head teeming with ideas but the other conditions, the same as yesterday. A mirror comes in handy. I drew the laterally inverted image of myself.


14. Fierce: The fierce focus of a fiercely loyal guard of an imaginary master in an imaginary play














15. Mysterious: 






















16. Fat: Science meets art. Fat is fact. The humps of a camel is widely believed to store water. Neither that theory nor the humps hold water. The humps hold fat. A Bactrian camel. 




























17. Graceful: Anna Pavlova as the dying swan. If this picture represents the ethereal grace even a little, I am satisfied.










18. Filthy: What can be filthier than violence and the instruments of violence! A poster with a quote from "The answer my friend . . . " by Bob Dylan and a drop of red ink.













19. Cloud: I love clouds - to photograph, paint, observe, interpret both visually and as an indicator of weather to come. This is a world where the cloud is ubiquitous. I only wonder if the "we-knew-it-all-the-while" crowd will one day claim that the cloud technology existed at the time of Kalidasa.















20: Deep. He looked so deep into the past, scientifically, that he came up with the theory of the big bang. A catholic priest from the catholic university of Leuven coming up with this theory is very interesting. 

























21. Furious: I imagined a hungry tiger disturbed at its kill after an exhausting hunt. 




















22. Trail. The faintly visible trail of a black swan, in the moonlight. Drawn in pen and brush and CTRL + Alt + I on Microsoft Paint.















 23. Blind. 

Q> Why does a skull look so happy?

A> Because, ignorance is bliss.

Correct



No eyes, no ears, no skin, no tongue, no nose. Ignorance!































24. Ship: Ship of the desert - the Dromedary camel.
The Arabs value this ugly supercilious looking animal which always seems to look down upon you so much that they have a story as to why it looks down upon man. 
Allah has a thousand names. 999 of which are known to man. Only the camel knows the thousandth one. Hence the contempt.






















25. Squeak: A young girl delighted with her new squeaky shoes.























26. Climb: A creeper climbs. Money plant over a bamboo support. In this painting the ink produced some unusual hues. Loved the lucky accident.


















28. Fall: For me, the best piece of my Inktober works. This idea was suggested by a friend for last year's Inktober. Lack of time and either the lack of skills needed or the lack of confidence in my skills made me shelve it then. The moment I saw 'fall' in the list of prompts, I knew what I wanted to draw. Having grown up in a book filled house, being a notorious book worm then (None of them text books) I drew an imaginary 'cartoony' portrait of myself from my college days. Imagine that one of the books falling is "The rise and fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer.









29. United: Opportunity for word play.






























30. Found. Stanley finds the long lost Dr. Livingstone after a long search and is said to have greeted him, they were formal days, with, "Dr Livingstone, I presume". Sounds hilarious to me.


















31. Mask. A mask for the wall. Avalokiteswara, a name the sound of which I love. And the concept of this Bodhisatva - he has the compassion of all the Buddhas in him.