Of Nature's Stories, Land Art, and Morning Altars

The first time I chanced upon the idea of nature/land/earth art was when I glimpsed sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist, Andy Goldsworthy's work in The Clothes Horse's blog. I was simply enchanted by the notion of abstracting stunning site-specific art from natural surroundings, putting together fallen leaves, branches, twigs, flowers, seeds, and fruit, rocks, pebbles, and feathers into art that entirely and literally emerges from and connects to the earth, seamlessly integrating itself into the environment.  I have been lately been pinning a ton of land art on my Pinterest and have discovered examples which left me breathless and marvelling at the artists' ingenuity and creativity, such as swirling twig waters around a boulder, stone paths in forests, and stone sculptures silhouetted against the sky. Here's a gorgeous Andy Goldsworthy in which he arranges numerous stones in graduated shades of gray to form an existential black hole of sorts in the vast universe that is nature.

After seeing scores and scores of incredible land art works, I wondered if I too could create miniature examples myself; a little bit of researching led me to realise that I had been partially doing it with the fallen flowers, seeds, seed-pods, and fruit I found during my morning walks. Having photographed the trees and plants, I found myself engaging with the gifts that they left for the earth - and for us to discover. I sometimes arranged what I found in a simple pattern or grid format, displaying the diversity of what I had found; it reflected both the species growing in my immediate environment as being season-specific, such as summer displaying a great deal of gulmohur and laburnum, for example. This earth art below below depicts the various stages of a gulmohur bloom that I found in one of my favorite neighborhood parks: bud, budding, blooming, bloom, and flower itself.

Yesterday, after posting a picture of my walk finds: a peepal tree leaf, bougainvillea, gulmohur petals, and a branch of lime green neem fruit on Instagram, Day Schildkret of Morning Altars liked it and which fortuitously led me to explore more of his work. I was intrigued by what he is doing: creating gorgeous, intricate morning altars, foraging from his surroundings to create the most exquisitely detailed works. It celebrates the ephemeral and the deeply rooted, nature with all of its bountiful glories and its cycles of death, rebirth, and growth. Here's one of his morning altars dedicated to spring below:

Inspired by his morning altars, I decided to create one of my own today morning. In the park, it was quiet except for the birds twittering and the sound of plum yellow neem fruit plopping on the ground; this was the background to which I created my first altar wrought from bougainvillea, laburnum, and gulmohur flowers and champak and bougainvilleas leaves. It celebrates the joy these nature's morning colors gives me and to brighten my day ahead, the little joys that I derive from these nature gifts and compensating for potential challenges and disappointments that may lie ahead in the day. Of course, I do wonder what will become of them once I leave...will nature find a way to make its own unique installation out of them?

I enjoyed the process so much that I ended up creating two more earth art works later today from found champak flowers, leaves, and neem fruit:

This activity gives me much peace as well as making me aware of the healing, restorative, and creative powers of nature; I find myself contemplating and appreciating nature's diverse manifestations much more closely. In this age, when we are battling climate change, habitat destruction, species' extinction, and many other depressing stories of environmental degradation, it powerfully drives home the message that we can no longer take nature and stories for granted for it may potentially disappear one day; let us hear its stories and more importantly, strive to conserve and preserve them.

Have you ever made impermanent art? I would love to hear!

Five Thoughts About April

1. I began a collaging-scrap book which is becoming a novel of my thoughts. I also painted a bit more this month, specifically expanding on my love for dots; I don't know where it has sprung up from, this inclination towards embedding the page with dots but it is a very calm, meditative process and imbues the painting with a strange, structured quality. Here is a third such chapter from my book: The Art of Cloud-Making.

2. I attended my first art event in ages and surprisingly, only my second one in Delhi after all this time living here, what with its uber-packed art and culture calendar. It was the closing ceremony of  multi-media and disciplinary artist, Satish Gupta's At The Feet of Buddha, where he presented ten sculptures, eight paintings and seventy two haikus. We heard Buddhist monks in orange robes chant, renowned Indologist, a venerable looking Professor Chandra in a crisp white kurta and dhoti talk about Buddhism, saying something which particularly resonated me that Buddha saw the entire universe in a leaf, and finally, the artist himself reciting his haikus. The giant contemplative Buddha was the focus of everyone's attention, mogras buds scenting the air all around him. We briefly chatted to the artist and he told us that it took him two years to wrought it. I have to say though  that my favorite part of the evening was hearing his wonderful haikus; read them here and here.

3. Time to blow my trumpet a bit! I wrote a piece about my love for the trees in spring-time on a whim inspired by a beautiful writing cue, participating in a writing competition for the first time in years (another first!). To my pleasant surprise, my entry was among the five winning entries for this month. You can read the piece here:)

4.  My abandoned sofa trail saw me spotting one in Mehrauli after almost a year since my last sighting in Delhi; it was unobtrusively hidden in a tangle of forest and scrub, its extremely dilapidated state indicating that it had been there for a while, almost becoming a part of the forest itself. It looked so at home in the spot, if one could say, that I wasn't tempted to extricate its back-story. This was its story.

5. It's the season of mogras once again. I bought a string or two from my local flower-seller and wrote about a poem about it, kickstarting my Friday poetry posts. The other evening, sitting inside the car and waiting for the traffic light to turn green, a man swung an entire bunch in front of us and offered to sell them for a bargain. "I need to go home and get rid of them," he succinctly told us. I had been planning to buy a couple of strings and so immediately leaped at the chance to buy a bunch of gorgeous-smelling mogra. Since then, they swayed on the rearview mirror, scented my living and bedrooms, and are now slumbering in the cold, protected confines of the fridge.

How was your April? I would love to hear!

Jacaranda Journeys

Entwined

First of all, isn't jacaranda such a beautiful sounding name for an undoubtedly beautiful flowering tree? Actually, I have to be a little bit honest: I don't find the individual mauve jacaranda flower as lovely as glimpsing them collectively blooming upon the trees, the bloom-laden branches silhouetted against the clear sky or scattered en masse upon the grass below.

We are fortunate to live in a neighborhood dotted with lots of gardens, consisting of both large, sprawling and cosy, miniature ones; I discovered one such latter garden during a spontaneous afternoon stroll on a moody, cloudy, cool Delhi day. I had seen the jacaranda blooming there from the distance but I didn't realise it was more than one tree that was blooming; it was only when I explored the garden that day that I observed it was a triad of trees in various stages of bloom, one already having considerably leafed. Being the only jacaranda trees in my immediate vicinity, I was thoroughly enchanted to be caught in a quiet drizzle of jacaranda flowers as they joined the sea of flowers splashing the emerald green grass below.

Sea of Purple and Green

Ever since I have discovered that garden, it has become one of my little pleasures to stop by there during my morning walks and sit beneath these trees; it's invariably deserted when I arrive so I have the satisfaction of having the garden to myself, rendering it in my eyes a secret garden. Even if it's just for five minutes, I quietly sit on a flower-speckled stone bench below the jacaranda trees, glimpsing the flowers fluttering here and there in the air before gently coming to rest upon the ground. 

Radiating

I have lately been taking great pleasure in making flower-dot paintings and so while I was sitting below the tree one morning, I scooped up a few jacaranda flowers, deciding to abstract something out of them too. I had called it the 'Journey of the Jacaranda Flowers' on Instagram, the flowers migrating from the tree to my palm to my sketchbook. There is something so calming and indeed, meditative arranging these flowers upon the stark white desert of my sketchbook, making it bloom before inserting the bindis of dots (perhaps, you could say that I am inspired by Bharti Kher's bindi explorations to a certain extent). Once I have painted, photographed, and Instagrammed the painting, I leave it upon my desk and when I return the following day, I find that the flowers have become dessicated yet certainly not diminished in any which way beauties. And so completes the circle of spring.

Creativity-Consumed

I have been feeling unwell for the past several weeks - and yet, simultaneously have never been as consumed by a desire to create as much as I am experiencing right now. Whether it's intense, meticulous outpourings in my red-notebook designated for morning pages or abstracting art from decaying, dying flowers juxtaposed with water-colors or making videos on my new phone or working on a short story about a Maharani who wants to become an archaeologist and has a cat called Holmes (he's a very clever cat), all I can currently think about is...creating. When I go outside, I become more aware than ever of the texture of bird-song, the trees blooming, budding, and leafing, the fragrance of nocturnal flowers. I find myself hungrily combing through the internet to learn something new every day, something utterly unknown and which will enrich my mindscape, planting dense forests of newnness. I suppose, I am paying much more minute attention to both my inner and external universes, something which I hadn't been doing for so long, the raucous clamor of both worlds drowning out and inhibiting this powerful desire to create. Or so I think, anyway. 

Some creative notes from this literal and emotional spring:

I have gotten into the habit of picking up fallen flowers these days and my best discoveries usually happen either during my daily morning walks or occasional dusk strolls. I found these gorgeous lilac-hued kachnar flowers below the bloom-laden kachnar tree standing across my home (it provides quite a backdrop to meditate upon while I write and gaze upon it from my study window) while the fiery crimson hibiscus was a fortuitous find below a bush. I thought they were no less exquisite in their decaying, dessicated states as they were in their just-fallen, still vibrant states - and preserved them between the pages of a sketchbook, introducing them into a minimal story of watercolor dots.

There is a large peepal tree amongst the many in our neighborhood which has been designated as a shrine, where you find miniature idols, plastic rosaries, framed paintings, and floral offerings wedged into the textured canyon grooves of the entwined tree trunks. While it receives offerings all year along, it is currently in the process of relinquishing its leaves. I found this fantastically hued leaf one morning and decided to perform a poster-color intervention to it, seeking to compete with its marbled chrome yellow, coffee-brown, and luminous green canvas.

Thanks to a birthday present in the form of a new phone, I have become completely obsessed with making videos (partly because of the excellent camera quality and also, I now have lots of memory space!) Our neighborhood was recently declared as the greenest one in Delhi and that's very much evident through the sheer diversity of flowering, leafing, and budding trees that one encounters walking whilst through it. The silk cotton tree with its flamboyant, fat red (or orange) blooms particularly stands out as it is among first of the trees to flower during spring. I captured one such video at dusk, standing below a silk cotton tree as crows feasted upon the blooms, which are now incidentally vanishing from the branches. I tried uploading the video but I unfortunately encountered technical snags so you glimpse can it over here: https://www.instagram.com/p/BC5LcYhonK_/?taken-by=iamjustavisualperson. 

Dubai Musings 1: Touching History

Old City Wall, Al Fahidi Historical District, Dubai

Do you know what it is like to touch history? Do you really think that you are touching history or just its cosmetic surface? Do you know that it is actually history? How do you know it is real and not just manufactured history? How do you know when history is history? When I touched what is the last remaining section of Dubai's Old City Wall, constructed in 1800 from gypsum and coral for defensive purposes, it didn't register, to be honest. I instead saw the wall as a conveniently interesting backdrop for a photo, rather than it being the subject of the photo. I focused upon the visual contrast of my silver jewelry, my ineptly applied mauve-pink nail-polish, and the textures of my hand-skin against the bumpy, chunky, ochre coral-studded surface. How do you distinguish between what is history and what is not? I once wanted to become a historian. Scratch that, I still have aspirations of becoming one. Yet, I think, I can't be much of one if I experience so much difficulty imagining what this place, what this space, what this wall must have looked like when its first inhabitants were once present there. I can only see its today, not yesterday. How can I be a historian if I can't imagine yesterdays? All I see is the present, an inescapable present, which clouds my vision and renders the yesterday and tomorrow superfluous, non-existent even. And wait – was I even supposed to touch this wall? But that's the thing. If you can't touch, all this is just thin winter air, a mirage, pretty much what Dubai is all about. Touching this wall makes it all real, even if faintly so.

*This short, stream of consciousness, staccato-toned vignette is the first part of my series about my recent visit to Dubai, word mosaics seeking to distill the essence of the picture accompanying the text

May Ramblings: Memoirs, Water-Color Experiments, and Exploring Delhi's Many Cities

May means:

Reading

Late to Tea at Deer Palace along with some fresh mogras and a postcard of the Grand Canyon

I have always enjoyed reading memoirs and this was a beautifully written one of an Iraqi family and the trajectory of its political and economic fortunes before eventually being displaced from their homeland and spending their lives in exile; the author, Tamara Chalabi minutely documents her family's history while contemplating the currency of the notion of Iraq in her life, both as a mythical abstraction derived from her family's many stories about their homeland as well as as its contemporary political status today. I randomly picked it up at Daryaganj's Sunday Book market, where every Sunday morning the pavements are lined with book-stalls, selling best-sellers, obscure novels, M&Bs, vintage Vogues, Christies and Sotheby art catalogues, coffee-table books, you name it. What I found most amusing was the book-store where best-sellers were sold for 100 rupees per kilo while Mills and Boons were 99 rupees per kilo! I discovered 'Late to Tea at Deer Palace' over there (I must confess it's romantic title and the aqua cover definitely influenced my decision to purchase it) and read it in the course of a weekend. While I have always been interested in Middle Eastern politics and history, I must admit that the quotidian minutiae of pre-war life in Iraq, under Ottoman rule and then, incorporating the cosmopolitan changes which swept the city following the arrival of the British was what intrigued me more. I loved reading about the costumes, wedding rituals and ceremonies, the dishes cooked and prepared, and superstitions which were wholly unique to that culture and age along with something which is personally close to my heart, the fluid idea of home and homelands.

As someone who has always preferred writing expansively and at length, it's heartening to see more and more long-form reads popping up everywhere  -  I unsurprisingly love the site, Long Reads, where I have had the pleasure of reading some excellent essays and articles. Two of my recent favorites were this Rebecca Solnit essay,  a superb meditation about the meaning of travel in our lives and this Judy Blume interview which I read today. I read practically all Judy Blume's novels while growing up and loved the candour, wit, and the freshness of her voice as she tackled that bewildering and challenging world of adolescence, in which there are so many questions and very little by answers and consolation (especially if you lived in an archaic pre-internet world, as the interview mentions;) Two of my favorite novels were Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself and Are You There God? It's Me Margaret. I would now like to read her novel for adults that the interview mentions too.

Painting

Migrating Moons: combining water-colors along with paper collage, something else which I am fond of

When I was ten years old, I took a weekly water color painting class for two months with one of then Oman's most well-known water color artists, Lynda Shepherd. I would go to her house on Thursday afternoons, sitting on a long white table along with several other girls, learning the techniques of water-color painting. I distinctly remember her teaching us how to expertly paint a sprig of bougainvillea and also, drumming into us shadows are not just inky black: they are a cocktail of multiple colors. I recall wishing to paint an ochre-hued wall of an Omani fort; however, she in turn asked me to render it in a palette of cool gray, mauves, and lavenders instead, the space appearing as if it had been painted in situ just before dawn, the literal grayland between night and morning. I painted in water color for many years afterwards, filling up sketch-books with my illustrations (the bougainvillea in my house garden, the Rajasthani kathputlis hanging on my bedroom wall, and recreations of photographs) before discovering oil painting in my second year of university. I almost exclusively painted in oils ever since then before a sudden impulse led me to purchase water-colors a few weeks ago. I still keep on treating them as oils though, ha...and while I honestly miss the sheer joy I experienced while mixing the color in oils,, there's something undeniably so crisp and instant about water-colors too: it's like taking a Polaroid of your thoughts.

 Exploring

Qutub-seeing

Diwan-i-Am, Red Fort

 The heat notwithstanding, the arrival of family in town meant we did a bit of Delhi sight-seeing: Qutub Minar and Red Fort, two of the places that our niece especially wanted to see because she had read about them in her textbooks:). The Minar was fabulously grand and dominated the area which was filled with tombs, mosques, and ruins, trees and monuments, botany and history, merging together. Red Fort was also a place which I had been wanting to visit for a while. As a child, we would travel to Delhi from Jodhpur by an overnight train and arrive in the city at dawn; we would go past the Red Fort, the saffron morning sunlight making it look redder than ever. I earlier used to exclusively associate it with the Indian Prime Minister's 15th August address; afterwards, as I studied more about Delhi's history, I began to appreciate its vital historical and architechural significance (William Dalrymple's portrait of the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Ali Zafar and him conducting court during the 1857 uprising in The Last Mughal was especially haunting) . Of late, I had seen its photogenic spaces featuring in many an Instagram feed I follow so I was glad to finally see it in person; however, as always, I often wonder what it would be like to see a historical place in seclusion, imagining as it was, rather than with hundreds of tourists milling about and well, rendering it hollow and devoid of back-stories and histories. Well, I too joined the click-crazy brigade that day, eagerly snapping photographs of that gorgeous, impeccable arch symmetry in the Diwan-i-Am along with its other miniature pavilions and landscaped gardens. This was the Delhi of my imagination and which had colored and shaped my anticipation before moving to it...but as time goes by, I am learning that the city is a hydra-headed creature and this romantic, tombs-monuments-historical Delhi is but simply one of them.

How is your May coming along?

My first story on Medium: The House with the Mint-Colored Walls

I love the idea of Medium and have enjoyed reading many stories that have appeared on it; in fact, I always look forward to its weekly digest every Friday, which features the best from the week. I thought it would be a great platform from where to start sharing my stories as well and so here I am, reproducing the first of my stories. And given my constant preoccupation with homes these days, perhaps, it's appropriate that my new house with its mint colored walls was the focus of my debut story. 

It's bit of a long read so sit back and enjoy...

**

Pink and Mint

The first thing that I saw when we walked into the apartment was its mint green walls.

We had just arrived in New Delhi two days ago. Since June, we had moved from Pittsburgh, traveled across the United States, and divided time between Bombay, Bangalore, and Rajasthan before finally making up our mind to come to India’s capital city. I was both utterly exhausted of being a nomad for the past many months and apprehensive about calling Delhi home. Actually, more precisely, calling India home.

Apart from annual holidays to the homeland while growing up in Oman, I had never previously lived in India before. I was becoming increasingly disconnected to the idea of calling it home over the years. In fact, the label itself was becoming a complex abstraction for me. Was the home in homeland actually home? What was home anyway? I could worry about the semantics of home later though. Right now, I wanted a house: a nice, comfortable house, where I could anchor myself and start fleshing it into my space again.

I fell sick hours after landing in Delhi. On our first night, we went to a mall where there was an indie rock concert going on in a huge open-air court. I remember sitting on the edge of a white marble planter, simultaneously listening to the crowd sing along to the music and feeling a dreaded itchiness invade my throat. Every time I had previously visited Delhi, its notorious dust and pollution had not been my friend. The following morning, I woke up to find that the itch had snowballed into a cold: my eyes watered continuously, my nose was on fire, and I had little desire to do anything but remain under the covers for the next day.

I couldn’t, of course. I had a house to find.

Our apartment was the second one that the real-estate agent showed us in what would be a long succession of potential homes. Seeing the green walls after a day of battling a burgeoning cold, consuming cold, dessicated sandwiches, and dodging dusty, traffic-clogged roads was like stumbling head-first into an oasis. I wanted to camp out on the sofa itself, refusing to budge further. Afterwards, once we were done with visiting the other apartments (good, terrible, and ugly), the only one that remained with me was the green wall apartment. In the morning light, it would be mint-green, I thought, by dusk, it would assume the shade of pistachio ice-cream. I like the green wall apartment, I told my husband at dinner that night, as we listened to three college-age musicians sing Bob Dylan, let’s take that one.

**

The Tree Whose Name I Do Not Know

We arrived in the apartment. My cold became a fever — and I spent the first week in our new house, ensconced in the bedroom, either staring at the ceiling or the windows bracketing me. On one side, the shadow of a massive peepal tree and its spreading, embrace-like branches and numerous leaves dutifully dappled the balcony while the other tree — whose name I still do not know — was framed within the window, like a minimal black and white photograph. During the day, their leaf shadows stenciled and overlapped one another upon the green walls, the walls fluid canvases. The leaf-shadow dance lulled me into sleep; the green soothed and calmed me.

The house swiftly became a welcome sanctuary after all those migratory, mobile months.

**

We are still in the process of turning our house into a home. In fact, we are still befriending the city, understanding its costume, its dialect, when it sleeps, when it wakes up, the art of razoring through its traffic jams. We potter about in the house, migrating from one room to another, wondering where the guest room should be, what color flowers will look good against the mint.

A river of traffic flows behind our house. We hear people’s conversations, dogs fighting, and ambulance and police sirens. I was accustomed to a soundtrack of silence in all the places that I had previously lived. This is the first time my ears are constantly negotiating the overwhelming barrage of sound, the sheer plurality of it; my mind is learning how to filter, distinguish one sound from another. However, I don’t miss the silence quite as much as I miss peering above into the nocturnal sky, glimpsing the dense population of stars studding its surface. Here, in the city, like any other city, they are just as invisible as they are during the day.

**
 

Our landlord’s art work meanwhile still dots the apartment walls. In the living room, you can see camouflage-hued tapestries of Paris, a bright bird water-color, an Ancient Egyptian god and goddess in dialogue, and a mountainscape sparely executed in oils. I have decided that these works will continue to hang there on the walls until we discover and introduce our own to them. In any case, they are strangers no more; our daily engagement with the works has made them familiar to us.

There are three paintings though that that we have decided to never remove as long as we stay in the apartment.

These paintings are portraits of three distinguished women hanging upon one wall in the living room. I call them distinguished simply because that’s exactly the sort of air they exude. I have no idea who these women are. I don’t even know the names of the artists who painted them. What I do know is that these portraits define the house as much as the walls themselves. And like the tree window-photograph in my bedroom window, I am content to see their framed selves on the walls.

One of the Distinguished Ladies

What is remarkable is that each of them wear an identical expression of contemplation in their portraits. They look as if they were mulling over a problem or a puzzle or a query — and were about to unpack their thoughts to the artist. The thoughts would quickly spill out, raw, unadulterated, like paint gushing upon a palette from a newly pierced open tube. Yet, the women would just as swiftly incorporate them into the bigger picture, the larger idea, connoisseurs of both the macro and micro. These women are constantly editing themselves, their thoughts, striving to be better, fuller, richer persons. But they wouldn’t bite back their words, that’s for sure. If they have something to say, they will say it.

When we say goodbye to the house with the mint colored walls, I already know that we will miss these three ladies. In the next few months, we will be constantly overlaying the house with our presence— paintings, photographs, furniture, objects, books, our conversations — and by the time we leave, the house will have become an alternate version of itself, a new draft, so to speak. Perhaps, by that time, I will have even figured out how to solve the mathematical-like conundrum of learning to call my homeland home. But what these walls and admirable ladies will remind us of will be those initial paint-strokes, those first words on the computer-screen, a freshly new time, when blankness was exciting, when anything could become everything.

**

You can read the original version here...and in the meantime, why don't you too think about sharing your stories there?

The Neon Horse: Of Collaging, Blogging and Looking At-ed Ness

Kitschy Horse, Collage, 2014

I impulsively decided to throw together a collage a few days ago. I find making collages as relaxing and enjoyable as taking long, meandering, purposeless walks. I visually gorge on a rich buffet of colors, images, and patterns, thinking about nothing in particular, cutting and ripping and pasting until the collage somehow...fits together. The journey of creating and the end result in form of an image, however startling or obscure, both appeal to me very much.

It had been months since I last made one and when I came across this journal while organising my collection of (many and mostly empty) journals, I decided that at least, its pages should be blank no more. In the past, I was used to making bigger-scale collages but I liked the diptych format that this journal gives me, it's like simultaneously writing two interlinked yet independent stories. I sheared through a single magazine (Vogue India's September issue, to be precise), as opposed to a whole bunch and ended up structuring the collage around this fantastical horse head that featured in an ethereal, dreamy shoot. Except it has much more of a neon kitschy vibe going on here when transplanted in the journal.

I can't help but wonder though if abstracting a collage is also a metaphor for what's happening in my life though. I have cut and pasted myself into a different city - and something inevitably and unsurprisingly has changed in that moment of transition. What is it though? And what of the narrative that I am writing myself into?

I am also thinking about the blog as well. I began it sometime in April 2011, describing it as the constant visual commentary running in my head. I also meant it to be a writing portfolio, where you could dip into and leaf through my writing. The blog and I have naturally evolved with time; it's not just about capturing whatever ensnares my visual fancy, impaling it beneath the glass case of a post. I can see the changes in my writing, even the nature of my looking-at: what I look at, how I look, the details which I now pay attention to and would previously never have considered.

There is more than just the look-at-nedness, perhaps. And so, I am wondering about the shape and direction this blog is assuming. Sometimes, there's so much I would like to do with it. Other times, I am content to fiercely stake it out as my garden, my space, my world, just as I had said in my very first post

Should I continue collaging it into my story as I have been doing all this time? Or entirely repurpose it?

I think I need to go take a walk and think it out...

PS You are most welcome to share your thoughts on your own journeys/challenges with blogging or other personal projects!

Photography Experiments: When Objects Meet Paper

Many years ago, when reading an interview with an Indian woman artist, I recall her saying that she was a magazine junkie and that the reason why she especially loved magazines was because of all that visual stimulation they provided - and which specifically nourished her visual soul. Upon reading her words, I realised that what she had articulated was exactly how I would have done so in regard to myself, explaining as to why I so particularly gravitated towards magazines and also helping me figure out that well, I was just a visual person;) Unlike the surfeit of visual options at our disposal these days in form of the internet and a smorgasbord-like array of online and print magazines, growing up in Oman, I could only access and rely on a limited selection of magazines for visual cues in cookery, fashion, interiors, and make-up, for example. I would spend hours at the magazine section in bookstores or stalls, swiftly browsing through multiple magazines even though a stern sign above explicitly discouraged from doing so. I remember being specially enthralled when I discovered bookstores during my late teenage years in which you could sit down and read as many magazines you wished to do so to your heart's content!

With passage of time, having both written for many magazines as well as having worked in one, my magazine mania persists although I have become much more sensitive to a magazine's design and visual elements, whether it's finding a page layout too cluttered or excess white space or jerky flow of text and images. However, in the end, I don't allow too many technicalities to dilute my enjoyment; after all, what ultimately really intrigues me and cements my affection for a magazine are the quality of  the visuals that leap off its pages - and in this context, fashion magazines and their infinitely varied fashion shoots have particularly been this magazine connoisseur's visual delight what with the crazy mashing and meshing of multiple layers and pairing of photography, styling, fashion, and stories.

Lately, though, I have started to think about 'intervening' in these magazine fashion shoots, questioning their permanence and whether or not you can alter them? After years of being a spectator, what would it be like to participate within these stories? I began exploring the notion of introducing what I called external interventions into the image - a piece of jewelry or even a bindi - and then, photographing it. How would that combination of photography, paper, and object subsequently appear?

Well, why don't you have a look below to find out?

The Power of a Bindi

As I was flipping through the February issue of In Style, I paused upon this image of Sarah Jessica Parker contemplatively studying this striking Gabriel Specter mural. My gaze lingering upon  the half-revealed eyes and the upside down rainbow, an idea struck me: I impulsively fished out a blingy orange bindi from my bindi stash and embellished the image with it to add further drama. As I had borrowed the magazine from the library, I wondered if I should let the bindi remain on the page? I wonder what a subsequent reader would make of it; would they be tempted to add embellishments of their own - or would they leave the image as it was, any library property being sacred? Belonging to that school of thought myself, I eventually removed the bindi...but I could not help thinking of the library books which I borrowed during my university days; I was always amused to encounter the notes/comments that readers would scribble in the margins - how subsequent readers would then respond or enlarge upon the points, the marginalia commentaries becoming yet another critical conversation in the text. Ah, the secret conversations of library books!

Purpleblueeyes

This image formed a part of a beauty editorial; the dramatically contoured cobalt eye make-up along with the matching nails made this iridiscent image a perfect backdrop for my silver and amethyst ring.

Desert Rose

There's nothing quite like the pleasure of soaking in the beauty of a rose bouquet in full bloom; however, I find it difficult to relinquish them even when they have begun shedding their petals and becoming wan, drooping versions of their formerly radiant selves. I find myself bidding farewell to them by preserving one of the roses within the pages of a heavy tome as a reminder of the blooms which once invested my home with such beauty and grace. This sepia-pink dried rose is from one such bunch I bought in June last year - and I thought it would be a whimsical and surreal idea to transplant it into a sinuously rippled monochrome desert.

Flash Photo-Narrative: Frozen Birthday Cake

The early morning light transports all that it touches into the realm of magical. Is this a mere white cube topped with metal spikes or a displaced art-installation from an art-gallery? Or is it actually a frozen uncut birthday cake, the candles resolutely still standing away, long blown silent, wishes made and received?

In this light, anything is possible.

 

Paper Art

What happens when a Macy star and a pipe-smoking fish meet:

Rockstar Fish

Having migrated from Japan to Pittsburgh, a lonely pink origami bird finds a friend in a bough which was otherwise restlessly cartwheeling through life :

An Angry Cloud, A Flying Bird and a Tree

The Season of Kites: A Kite Falling

Flying High

Often, while writing at my desk, my eyes straying towards my six month old kite painting sitting there, I have begun to sense that it has been waiting to speak to me for some time. The painting itself is quite simple: a cut, stringless fuschia-bodied and yellow and turquoise ear and tailed kite flying/suspended in a monotone blue sky above a tree-top full of paper pieces of kite. I didn't paint the kite; I instead glued a miniature paper kite from a bagful that I bought from a stall in New Delhi onto the canvas. The pieces of kite in the tree too are from one half of another paper-kite that I mutilated in order to adorn my painting. I cannot recall what it is that I did with the other half: it presumably sits alongside the other intact paper kites, marooned and wingless. I call the tree in my painting kite tree.

 Late last January, while visiting Jaipur for a literature festival, I used to see these kite-studded trees wherever I went. I recognized the kite remnants as leftovers from the mid-January festival of Basant when Jaipur ritually climbed up to the flat-topped house roofs and participated in kite-flying contests. Those kite-trees still retained that spirit of festivity and celebration and seemed unwilling to relinquish this unseasonal cargo of theirs, this blossoming of mutated rainbow-hued flowers. These kite-trees figure amongst my most memorable memories of that particular January in Jaipur: translucent blue glass morning skies, melted butter sunlight, and those happy, fecund trees.

It was sometime ago when I came across an article referring to the kite-eating trees in the comic strip, Peanuts; those trees sounded carnivorous, a pirhana-like sounding avatar of the scarlet-faced Venus flytrap. My Jaipur kite-trees and the one in my painting were not hungry: they rather accepted the kite fragments into their fold with outstretched arms, as that of a mother, affectionately feeding the kites' illusion that they were still aloft. It was akin to snowflakes starring a black coat, allowed to briefly retain their original and inherent individuality, rather than falling and congealing into the faceless floor of snow. You would not demote beauty into detritus by mistaking those snowflakes for dandruff; how could you then mutilate maternity into Medea by conflating those kite-fragments as objects of consumption?

 I am focusing on the tree although I know that it is the kite in the painting which seeks to say something to me. Let us train our gaze towards it. My kite appears an Icarus, his feather and wax wings silhouetted against the sun, supremely confident in this moment of aerial triumph. And yet, if you peer more closely, my kite is not as much airborne as it is falling and in possession of the knowledge that it will ultimately bypass the cushioned security of the tree. My kite is falling. My painting is a photograph of a kite falling. And I am sitting here and watching it fall, unable to do anything. 

 When kites fall in my part of India, telephone, electricity and barbed wires often disrupt their descent to earth; it is common to see kites ensnared in knots of wires, gradually turning into shish-kebabs of fried paper and wood over time. Otherwise, they fall flat on their faces and are instantly submerged in anonymity, becoming as non-descript as the nearby discarded wastepaper. At their luckiest, the kites will glide down onto lawns of house gardens; their prospective owners, the neighborhood boys will then cluster around the main entrance gate, unguently calling out to whomever they see to fetch the kites; sometimes, people of the house oblige, sometimes, they don't. The boys immediately squabble if and when the kite comes into their possession, fiercely arguing over who is legitimately entitled to acquiring this prized trophy of a furiously fought sky-duel.

Spot the Kite

I saw a kite fall this July. I was standing outside in my uncle's garden, contemplating whether to write in my journal or finish reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The air was sepia-colored, the clouds melted burnished brass, and the atmosphere thrummed with the kind of anticipation akin to that before a theatre performance. I finally sat down on a three-decade old viridian green metal bench, having abandoned both the book and journal for gazing hypnotically up into the blanched pink evening sky. There were kites too in the air: black rhombuses hovering parallel to each other, their strings pencil lines across the firmament. A baby cried; the music store next to the bakery across the road was playing a popular Hindi film song from four summers ago, instantly transplanting me to a similar evening then, redolent of the familiar odor of unwatered dust, growth, and the charged, electric finale to a deadening, hot, dull day. It was as if today had never existed and yesterday was static. I found myself holding my breath, afraid that if I exhaled I would never recover what I had just so serendipitously discovered. 

The dog heard it fall before I did. It started barking and bulleted from the house and onto the white marble verandah. The baby had stopped crying and I saw that a kite had fallen amid the stumps of the recently amputated lime tree. In the diminishing dusk light, the kite was pale-colored and sickly and I instinctively knew that no one would come to fetch and fight for it. It was destined to remain in that armless embrace until the sun and monsoon rain bleached and sheared it away into becoming a skeleton once more, returning it into the form from which it had originally grown. It had fallen and how: an ignominous descent for it remained in the limbo of falling and yet not having actually parachuted to the ground. It was a kite ghost: never to be trampled to mutilation, never to be worshipped as a trophy, and never to glamorously electrocute itself in dramatic pyrotechnics on electric cables. I wished then I could say that it was a beautiful sight, the fallen kite and the newly-turned kite tree. I could not, though, no matter how much I tried to photoshop tragedy: the kite was now merely a flat diamond shaped piece of paper and the tree, reduced and atrophied.

 I think I am beginning to understand what the kite in my painting is speaking about to me and why. It is asking me where it is falling. You are just part of a painting though, I should respond, there are no brackets to your story; the painting is the story in itself and like every other spectator, I too wonder where the kite is falling. This is the way I should respond. But I cannot. What is the use of starting to narrate a story that you cannot complete? Does not the story-teller have the right to know the ending of his story considering he is its very first audience? I am the story-teller in this case and I must find out where the kite falls. Unlike Daedalus, I could not warn the kite of the dangers inherent in the pleasure of flight; unlike Daedalus, though, I can surely narrate it the story of its fall. 

***

Note:

Come January and I reflect upon the many wonderful winter trips I have taken to Rajasthan during this month in the past. What with the festival of Makar Sankranti coming up, which marks the arrival of spring and witnesses many an iridescent kite dotting the sky then in Rajasthan and Gujarat, for example, I was reminded of this piece which I wrote several years ago. It was interesting to revisit it, both in terms of nostalgia as well as the writer that I was and the literary and stylistic sensibilities influencing me then.

P.S I unfortunately do not have a picture of the painting I write about in the essay. I still have these paper-kites though and some of which I have used to adorn my home, which I have depicted in this post. However, what to do with the remaining kites? Perhaps, it is time for another painting.

This essay originally appeared in Blood Lotus literary journal's Issue 8, March 2008; read it here

Still Lives: Photography Compositions

I have lately acquired two new great loves: baking and still-life compositions. Both require exacting degrees of preciseness, leaving little space for improvisation or dramatic last-minute innovation unless you are sufficiently skilled in the technique to do so. Too little moisture or one more object…the finished product becomes cracked or cluttered. 

 And when everything is perfectly calibrated - taste, texture - it feels…right.

A Leaf in a River

If memory is a river, I continuously cross back and forth to recline upon the banks of nostalgia; these banks are called Oman and Rajasthan and wherever I sit, the river flows...and flows...the leaf simply following the currents.

Walk Treasures

Wherever I walk, I can’t stop myself collecting and preserving the richness I encounter on the ground below: feathers, pebbles, shells, flowers, and leaves. Here are my pickings from my recent walks, reflecting the season falling around me. The only exception is the crimson baby tomato, which I woke up one morning to find sitting exactly where my apartment balcony and air meet. For a while, I reveled in the mystery of this unexpected guest; then, I looked up only to find my neighbor growing tomato plants in the balcony above. What is preferable: the suspense of mystery or relief of mundane knowing-ness? Still pondering…

Fragile Dreams

We all have our - multiple, varied -  dreams tucked away in the secret diaries of our mind… Years later, paging through them, they tumble out, these dessicated, beautiful things, which will threaten to turn into dust at the merest touch.

The Sole Truths of Fashion

A snapshot of my mind: i) reading fashion memoirs - Justine Picardie’s My Mothers Wedding Dress and which I highly recommend and b) visual junkie fix: fashion magazines c) writing about fashion and last but certainly not the least d) shoes carted away all the way from Oman, soul-fix for the feet

Painting Classes: Forays into Oil, Acrylic and Collage

I have always been fond of painting since childhood; I have several sketch-books from those years, filled with water-color vignettes of my life (Rajasthani puppets, money-plant cuttings growing in glass jars, pink-blossom creepers silhouetted against the cerulean blue sky). During fourth grade, I took water-color painting classes from a British artist acclaimed for her water-color depictions of Oman and then, discovered oil-painting during my second year of university: the fused smells of turpentine, linseed oil, and paint swiftly became addictive as did playing around with the combination upon canvas.

However, since then, there have been gaps of several years in which I never found the time or frankly speaking, the inclination to sit down with paints, palette, and a fresh white canvas. Reflecting upon the situation, I realised that for me, it had always been a pleasure to paint in a group, rather than on my own. Unlike writing, where I require silence and isolation (I would never be able to write in a coffee-shop, for instance), I enjoy the fertile energy that painting in a group produces and consequently, becomes a source of creative fuel to tap into. And so, when I chanced upon art classes here, I thought it would be a great and timely opportunity to refine techniques, acquire new tips, and absorb the communal creative atmosphere.

I opted for oil and acrylic classes, where I hoped to make further explorations into oil-painting - and  and embrace acrylics, which I had never attempted before. While learning and grounding technique was one crucial aspect of the classes, I also started to think more deeply about what I wanted to paint - did I just want to go with the flow and create stream-of-consciousness abstracts (ie simply messing about with paint!) or studiously cultivate a theme and work on a series? While the latter did not happen as such, I did work quite a bit with mixing collage and oils and some fun, spontaneous works such as this happened below:

Loquacious Planet, Oil and Collage

Mostly painting with oils and the classes being weekly also meant that I witnessed a painting emerging from a series of distinct, defined layers. Earlier, I would complete paintings in one sitting, unconcerned about layering/underlying colors: it was almost as if I was just seeking instant creative gratification. However, over here, I appreciated the transitions that the paintings underwent and the individual avatars they assumed at each stage of being painted. I also made it a point to capture each layer with my third eye aka my phone;) so I could look back on how the paintings evolved...

This was the result of my first class

Multiple Personality Disorder, Oils and Collage

Apart from intermarrying collages and oils, I did end up working on a couple of abstracts:

Storm Sky, Oils

And once I stumbled into acrylics, I couldn't help but think as to why I had never tried them before; they took me back to my water-color days, when I would meticulously work upon perfecting the junction of water and pigment. However, I had become so accustomed to using oil as a medium - and savoring the luxuriant manner in which it allowed paint to be blended and layered - that it took me a while to familiarise myself with using water instead. While I definitely had fun with acrylics and now looking forward to working on a piece combining them with oils, I must confess that I will always remain an oils fan-girl though...! 

Waiting to Take Flight, Acrylics and Collage

Apart from the weekly discipline of the classes and painting for several hours in one sitting, I also appreciated working alongside others in the studio - which was precisely what I had been seeking. Multiple conversations peppered the air: talking about art, giving feedback to a fellow classmate or simply walking around, pausing, and engaging with their art-works. As the classes approached conclusion, I was a little wary of whether I would still continue painting, given that the motivation/discipline would no longer be present to do so. However, I recently came to know about a group meeting regularly at various spots in Pittsburgh to paint in open air (something that I have never tried before!) - and well - that should be quite a challenge and incentive! Watch this space as to how that unfolds...