The Smile

I saw this woman in my dreams yesterday. I tried to represent her as best as I can. She was leaner. Jowar roti and uLLAgaDDi and menShinkayi forming a major part of her diet. She looked harder, in a work-hardened way. You could easily assume that she is from the cotton growing areas of North Karnataka. The seragu of her saree draped over her head in the typical north Karnataka way. Like in most dreams, the light was diffused and not random.

What was that smile? Wry? Sadness? Contempt? Self-pity? A combination of one or more of those?  Definitely not self-pity there!? Even in that half-awake state of my lucid dream trying to pin her smile down.

Was she laughing at the self-congratulatory claims of respect for women, the rapes that woke up the nation once forgotten?

Was it at the stupid reactions to farmer suicides? Or, no reactions at all?

Was it at the development that leaves millions behind? Homeless, perhaps?

Was it at the blindness and the glibness of the people who wield power?

It feels like I had a thousand alternatives but only the ones above com up.

Her face and smile nagged me so much that I tried to sketch her soon after I woke up. A thumbnail and then a fist sized one and then this. On an impulse, I put some colours on it. It does look haunting. Or, it does, to me, because the thoughts that ran through my mind?  As it often happens, I was using some papers from a diary/planner. I have lots of those.

In any case, here she is. Opinions if any are welcome.

Also, I wondered if this should go on my Art blog or the general one. For whatever it is worth here it goes on the Art blog.

Losing the City's Character

The Venue of last Sunday's session of Pencil Jam or the Weekend Drawer's Club (WDC) of PencilJammers was MG Road. I ended up at the MG Road metro station,  which is opposite Higginbotham's. 

I was shocked to see that it was ready for demolition. 

I love old buildings and am always sad to see them neglected and in disrepair. The worst form of neglect is demolition. You don't care if it exists anymore or not.

Bangalore had, and still has, many such old and beautiful buildings. They are disappearing at an alarming rate. 

Higginbotham's being demolished is a double whammy. It is a book shop. Was. Bangalore crows that it is the silicon valley (or plateau) of India. That means it has intellectual pretensions. In such a place, to see a bookshop and an old lovely building ready for the wrecker's ball is really sad.

I am relatively new to Bangalore. I have spent many happy hours inside Higginbotham's, browsing through and buying books. I did that even when I used to travel to Bangalore on work and could spare some time.

I can't imagine Bangalore without this shop and its old building! In some ways, Banglore has lost something of its character. Well, it is one of many features that created Bangalore and it is going to disappear.

During the jam, I sat in front of it and drew trying to capture and hold on to the place. The urge to possess it in some way, and not let go, was very strong. 

I had taken some photographs and drew again at home, with them for reference. 

Bangalore has been rainy for weeks now. So the lighting was diffuse. Even with that, the portion behind the facade looked well lit and the facade itself, dull. To me, it sounded appropriate - that the place had a bright and glorious past and its future bleak or non-existent. I tried to capture that as much as possible through the sketch and a quick, loose watercolour. 

The feeling of loss won't go away but, I somehow possess its soul - at least a part of it. When I say soul, I do not mean it any mystical or idealistic sense - which I do not believe in. It is a feeling. That elusive thing called character. A yearning. A sense of respect for an image of something that housed the outcome of what is uniquely human. 

My Paintings' New Home

Whenever I gift or sell my sketch or painting to someone, I request that the receiver or buyer send me a picture of their home that shows how and where it hangs.

All accept and promise that I will soon receive a picture. No one had ever fulfilled that promise. 

Until now.

Here are the two pictures I received a few days ago and I am elated.

From the top one of the two paintings in the photographs hangs a tale.  A few years ago I received a call from a gentleman who requested that I let him use that picture on a wedding invitation! His daughter was getting married in that very church and he wanted the picture on the invitation card! He had searched on Google for a picture of the St. Andrews Church on Cubbon Road, Bangalore and this was among the hits Google returned in response to his query. There were many photographs, of course, but he wanted this. I was really flattered and I let him use it.

In turn, he graciously invited me to the wedding which, I attended. It was a lovely wedding, indeed!

As coincidence would have it, Facebook told me that I posted the picture of the St Andrews' Church exactly four years ago!

The two pictures now hang in the home of a dear friend's sister, in the US. This post is also a note of thanks to the friend and her! 

I wish her and her family a lot of happiness!!

Love Hijacked

A few years ago, I sketched a picture of a mother and child. I called it, “Mother and Child, Layers of Love". In some unexpected ways it is one of the most successful pieces of art I have created.

The mother in the picture, informed me that the picture has been used for commercial purposes. She asked me if I knew of it and if I had permitted it. I was surprised and investigated it and found that it was true. I took the necessary action to see that those who had infringed my copyright realised it and acted on it. Well, the matter is yet to be resolved and I do hope to soon.

When I mentioned this to an artist friend, he pointed out that there was a Facebook page with my picture as the profile picture. I looked it up and, very helpfully, the person who had plagiarised my work had helpfully put his phone number on the picture! I thought that was funny. When I saw his page, I realized that he was using my picture to solicit commissions for art work. That meant that the intent was commercial. I called up the guy and asked him whose picture it was. He calmly told me that it was his! He was perhaps hoping that he was about to get an order for a commissioned work. When I told him that the work was actually mine and he was infringing my copyright, he insisted that he had sketched it from a photograph. Then, I told him that if it was so, he was infringing the copyright of the photographer! I told him that if he does not remove the picture right away, I would ask the photographer to call him and ask him to remove it. If he still did not, we would both take action. All this must have sickened the poor chap and after twenty-four hours, the picture was off. The cover picture of his Facebook page is by an artist I found on the site Deviant Art!!

I looked further as to where else my picture had gone. I came across something that really made me angry. It was used on a blog to promote the celebration of Parents’ Worship Day and bad mouth Valentine's day!! I wrote a comment on the blog claiming my right and asking the blogger to remove the picture. I am not very hopeful of that being done. As of writing this, it has not been done.

I would like to declare here in no uncertain terms that I have nothing to do with the organisation that is behind the half brained controversy about Valentine’s day! I want to have NO part in parent worship, or for that matter, any worship at all! I am fascinated by expressions a mother’s love (human or otherwise) I react to it from the deepest recesses of my being, I do not look at it with rose tinted glasses. I see that that the source of that love lies in the process of evolution driven by the selfish gene. Does that make a it any less beautiful? I do not think so.

I also found my picture being used in glitzy filmy websites along with syrupy glorification of a mother’s love. I find that particularly offensive in a country where the sex ratio is all awry because of female foeticide. Apparently the male of the species deserves the “divine” love more than the female.

What these incidents and many others show is that in India awareness about intellectual property is very low. Perhaps those of us who are aware do not respect it all that much. When the existence of a land mafia is proof enough that we do not respect the normal kind of property, let alone the intellectual variety! I am not saying this as an IP professional that I am. I have come across the attitude of indifference often. Many artist friends, many professionals from different fields think that if it is on the internet, it is free to use.

Once, some artist friends and I were talking about copyright. When I said that one can not make a sketch from a photograph that is protected by copyright and that anything not explicitly declared as under creative commons licence or declared as copyleft we should not use, people around were incredulous! They even argued that it did not matter to the photographer in any way. The conversation was going all over the place when a wise friend intervened. He said something like "It will look different to you if the shoe were to be on the other foot. Just imagine that you photograph something and an artist makes a painting with it as reference and it sells for a million dollars." That is not the best of arguments but it sort of brought the point home.