For Lunar.

The decluttering goes on. And so I find scribbles and doodles I'd forgotten about. Here's one I did one day last year, after visiting a fellow blogger's site.   I was thinking about her courage and indestructability.

The Timid Painter.

What I like best about decluttering is finding things I'd forgotten.
Which tends to be most things I find. These are my first attempts
at watercolour, from back in the 90s or maybe it was the late 80s
(I've forgotten that too). I decided to go to a class held by
a Bahraini artist. This was my first tentative attempt:

I have uploaded it as "Small" because it's hardly worth looking at,
and yes, it really was that faint and timidly painted!

From my second attempt, I realised that this is supposed to some part
of Bahrain's coastline, with seagulls flying overhead:

There they are again, those seagulls .. I think I was learning how
to do something called a wash, and getting the sky and the sea right.
I don't think I succeeded, although they are at least identifiable in this one.

My third painting rather surprised me (today, I mean. I'm not sure
if it surprised me back when I did it). I think it's painted off
a photograph I took years ago on a visit to Mysore. Somewhere
near Tipu Sultan's summer palace, if my memory serves me
correctly? Which it frequently does not. Anyhow, I like this one
so naturally I uploaded it as "Large".

Hang on. I see palm trees. Maybe this one is somewhere in Bahrain, too.

Yes. Nothing profound today. Just decluttered pictures. And
unsuccessfully-decluttered memories.

Mother Bunny.

I tried copying a Madhubani painting yesterday. I had underestimated the art, perhaps because it's "tribal", almost childlike in its style and colour, more akin to a doodle than, say, The Last Supper. It was much harder than I expected. It would have been easier with a thick felt-tipped pen, but I decided I had to do it with paint and brush. This was my first attempt:

Today, I decided that I was more Mother Bunny than Madhubani, and allowed myself to just paint as I felt like. As you may have noticed from my blog, I like drawing faces, so I painted what I remembered of the woman's face in the Madhubani painting. I took the whole evening to finish this, and thoroughly enjoyed myself until I started to feel guilty for not doing something "useful". But then I reminded myself how important it is for me to do just this - paint, enjoy myself - for my sanity, my health, my pleasure.

Later this evening I started reading a book by Bertrand Russell, called Why Men Fight. I'd forgotten the reason I picked it up at the library was because I read this quotation on the back cover:

"The supreme principle, both in politics and in private life, should be to promote all that is creative, and so to diminish the impulses and desires that centre around possession."

So in retrospect, I had a supremely useful day.

Know.

I'd forgotten what fun it is.

Ah. Crayons. Thanks to my overenthusiastic Christmas generosity,
I found myself left with a spare box of jumbo Crayolas. My inner child
was delighted.

How to Prevent Murder

"The dramatic term soul murder probably was coined in
the nineteenth century; it was used by the great Scandinavian
playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Ibsen defines it
as the destruction of the love of life in another human being.
In psychiatry, the term was made familiar by the paranoid
psychotic patient Schreber, whose Memoirs (1903) were
the subject of one of Freud's long case histories (1911)."

- Leonard Shengold, from his book Soul Murder Revisited
(click the title to read Chapter One)

Trees to paper to trees.

I saw these three tree designs in a book on applique stitchery
and they looked such fun I couldn't resist giving them a try -
but remembering years of accidentally stitching my needlework
projects to my school tunic, I decided I'd be better off working
with paper and scissors. An excellent form of therapy for anyone
with packrat tendencies. I can now justify all those old magazines
that I Just Can't Throw Away.

The big Kiwi lie.

I swear the shadows really did look like that. Honestly.
And talking of honesty, the Kiwis lied to me.
This apple came with a little label that read "New Zealand Delicious".
It was not.

Postcard #3

And this one should be arriving in Delhi any day now.

A second postcard

Finally. Postcard #2 is done and ready to be mailed. What I'm enjoying
most about this project is finding three unrelated people - the person
in the picture, the person whose words I've quoted, and the person
who receives the postcard - and creating a connection between them.

Practice makes pearfect.

 I have spent the last few days painting a pear. It is an American
pear, although I'm not sure it is a Seckel, as they are supposed
to be quite small. A few visitors asked me if it was a deformed
apple (the actual pear, not my attempts to draw it).

It was a fun exercise, because I first tried watercolour, then
a black-and-white pencil sketch, and finally the watercolour pencil
one you see here. I had intended attempting a fourth - in oil pastels -
but hunger got the better of me.

I'm not sure if it's because I left the pear out for so many days,
or if this is just the way it's supposed to taste and feel. The first bite
was juicy, but the overall experience is one of powdery mush.
I've eaten as much as I could bear, and stopped. Perhaps it was
the anticipation, the you-can't-have-it-till-you've-painted-it.
Or perhaps it turned into a senior citizen while I took my time
over the paintings. But it was definitely more fun to paint than to eat.

Next time I shall pick something I don't want to eat. Watch
this space for eggplant. Or click here for better pictures
than mine:  The Art of Botanical Illustration: An Illustrated History

Just because.

Just because it's a cheap little Government of India yellow post card,
doesn't mean it has to be boring. Or rural. Or official.


(If you want to know more about the lady who said this, click this link: The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life or maybe you'd prefer wiki

This postcard, mailed to my niece, is the first of many that I hope
to doodle and send out across the country. If you're in India
and would like to get a card too, email me your postal address,
and perhaps one day you'll find something like this in your postbox.

The things you find.

Lately I have been trying my hand at watercolour painting.
Mostly on my bedroom wall, using watercolour pencils
that I picked up in the kids' section of a stationery shop.
This evening I remembered I had a pad of watercolour paper
lying around somewhere. I dug it out, and discovered that I have
already tried my hand at watercolour painting. I'd quite forgotten.
I think it was some time in the early nineties, because this one
must have been done after one of those Indian Fine Arts Society shows.

For those of you unfamiliar with Hindustani classical music, the tanpura
is a stringed instrument that "drones" in the background and provides
a steady beat for the lead musicians.

Beads for jewels

I always say that Manipal Hospital's greatest asset is its nursing staff - they are gems. My mom, dad and I have all had our turns in the hospital's Intensive Care Units, and every time, the nurses have taken such excellent and sincere care of us.










So when Daddy went in for bladder surgery, I decided I needed to do something special for these gems of the Urology department. I'm fascinated by all things Native American (I would like to believe that somewhere in my ancestry there is a Cherokee soul) so when I discovered the craft of cording with beads, it became a hobby. However, I didn't think the nurses would appreciate little beaded lizards, so instead I decided to make each of them a beaded name-tag on a key-ring. They were thrilled with the results, and so was I, so decided I must share some pix here.

P.S. The hand is mine.