Life is a Multi-Dimensional Journey in the Space-Time Continuum
Indian summers aren’t complete without eating mangoes. The more the merrier…
We went on a mango picking trip, driving about 90 kms away one-way from Bangalore to a farm in Krishnagiri in the neighboring state.
Now, that’s what love for mangoes can do to you!
A trip to Meghalaya via Assam. A beautiful state, lush green with vegetation, doubting yet friendly locals, lazy, serene and amazing!!!
It can be expressed only in pictures –
You can never go wrong with an ancient temple, in the middle of an island, in the middle of a humongous river (The Brahmaputra)…
A summer trip to Meghalaya, with a stop over at Guwahati in Assam. A personal boat provided by a tout who fleece their customers. The same old queues to enter the temple, devoted people jumping the queues since they are born smart and of course the sultry heat of the city. Nevertheless, a beautiful temple in the city.
The boat –
The island –
The temple –
After a wonderfully unsuccessful attempt at digging an open well and getting nothing in the name of water…how about this?
a few days of rain and my well swelled up with water. To top it, the water remained so for several weeks now! It has been two months and the immense happiness I have got is from the following success I had:
1. A neighborhood farmer with two dry bore-wells to his credit has been sneaking into my farm and using my well water for his needs. I was actually happy that he found use for it. I didn’t have any crops to feed and the man was taking a few bucket fulls for his home too!
2. Several frogs took up residence in the well! I helped create something in nature!!!
3. A snake came from nowhere and is now feasting on the frogs in the well! Well, a bit of a loss here, but nevertheless contributing to my best extent towards the preservation of nature…
Now, this is what happiness is all about…Who cares about that promotion at work anymore…
In July, I went back to pencil sketching. My speed has increased and hopefully so, my quality of work. I completed this in about four hours with breaks in between. The focus was on the eyes and the hairy contours in the body, especially the ears.
Here is how I started working on it. The goal was to get the face right before the rest!
Some said the dog looks old! Some said it looks sad! I thought it was a cute little puppy, all inquisitive and wanting to be loved…
This is my first work on canvas using acrylic paints! It was part of a summer camp that my kids attended and I happily tagged along. Took two months to complete with all the breaks and office work in between. Began in April and completed in June.
The biggest challenge with this work was the lack of familiarity with the medium and the material. I was guided by my art teacher through the various aspects of bringing shadows and color tones to the picture. I experimented a lot on my own with selection of colors and brush strokes to create various elements of nature (the grass, the tree trunk, the flowers etc.) into a more realistic art form.
Used Camel acrylic colors. The primary colors used were sap green, brown and lemon yellow.
A very satisfying experience especially when work was not so during that timeframe!!
Yet another work using Staedler color pencils. The challenge was in getting the iridescent colors on the neck of the pigeon right using a limited range of colors that I had available. Working on the eyes was the other challenge. Hopefully, I got it right!
I can now fool the pesky pigeons that sit on the edge of my apartment balcony. They have a new friend!