Airport sketches

New York subway sketch I

2006

Patterned Hat

Plane/Airport Doodles

Instead of delaying posts for want of narrative I decided to just post more sketches (Thanks to Ujwala for the suggestion). Don't forget to check out my "photography" and "writing" blogs.

First Portrait

11X14
Acrylic on Hardboard
2001

This is my first attempt at painting portraits (5 years ago). Also, this is my first acrylic painting. Since then I have been using acrylic for most of my works.

Sculpture

It is fun to play around with clay. When we were constructing a house many years ago, we also had to dig a well for a water supply source. In the process of digging deep we hit a layer of clay. As a child, I remember being delighted with the amount of clay excavated. If my memory serves me right I treasured that big lump for a long time - tearing out bits of it to make endless odd shaped objects and small figurines.

Recently, I had a chance to indulge my need to dabble in clay when I bought some "clay that never dries" from an Art supply store. I just made up this bust of a bearded man in a hat. I have always found it easier to sketch men in beards and some headgear - you can easily cover up your anatomical errors under a hat and some facial hair! I'm sure the same applies to sculptures too.

Ilaiyaraaja and I

By a strange coincidence the Maestro and my father were both born the same year. The coincidence does not stop there – the same year that I was born, Ilaiyaraaja made his debut in Tamil cinema! One does not need these coincidences to feel a deep connection with the compositions of this genius. Ilaiyaraaja has the capability to enrich one's life not by enslaving you to his great work, but by opening the doors to a whole wide range of music.

When I was a child I was under the mistaken impression that all “new songs” were “bad”. That impression was because my parents would listen only to Thyagaraja Bhagavadhar, Seerkazhi Govindarajan, and other songs of yesteryears. Although I developed a taste for those classics (albeit reluctantly), I could not deny the immense pleasure I derived from the compositions of Isaignani. At that time I did not even know that there was such a composer named Ilaiyaraaja. I would just hear his songs wafting from the radios in the neighboring houses and I would sit listening to them mesmerized by the depth of feeling and melody in the tune.

As I got older and started asserting my independent taste in music, I started collecting Echo cassette compilations. Nothing was dearer to me than those pink cassettes stacked up on my shelf. I would play them for hours on end. I would lie on the couch and arrange the speakers on either side of my head and listen to the intricacies of the doyen’s compositions. Invariably I stumbled upon “How to name it?” and “Nothing but Wind” – the albums that widened my horizon to appreciate the beauty of classical music. Through these albums I understood why Ilaiyaraaja welcomes Thyagaraja, loves Mozart and has his talk with Bach….and a whole new fascination with classical music began. This is what I mean by Ilaiyaraaja opening the doors to a wide range of music. In my opinion, a good composer should whet your appetite for great music – I am greatly indebted to Ilaiyaraaja for doing just that for me and probably millions of his fans.


I had always wanted to see Ilaiyaraaja in person. Imagine my surprise and great joy when a contact I got through a friend told me that I could do that when Raja comes to felicitate MSV and Ramamurthy at Kamarajar arangam in Chennai! It has been my dream to paint some portraits of Raja and I was not going to pass up this opportunity to shoot my own reference photos of the maestro. I promptly bought tickets to the function. I was fortunate enough to take several close-up photographs of the composer. I have used two of those for the sketches displayed here. I am not going to go into details of the function, suffice it to say that it was one heady experience for me to see him, hear him speak and break into a short spontaneous song.

During the recent live concert in Chennai, when the M.C praised Ilaiyaraaja to the skies, in all modesty the composer had replied, “.....apdi ellaam onnum illa, isai kadalil alai pola, alaiyil nurai pola, nuraiyil thuzhi pola, vandhuttu pora thuzhi naan” (.......nothing like that, I am just a speck of dust afloat the froth on a wave in the ocean of Music). That may be true according to him, but that speck is what enhances the beauty of the mighty ocean for me.

Travel to India – Madurai to Chennai

(This is part of a series on travel to India. Please read parts I, II, III and IV before reading this for continuity.)




Aboard the good old Thiruvalluvar in SETC avadharam, I was headed for Chennai (formerly Madras). The green metropolitan buses in Chennai were a sight to behold after all these years. My stay in Chennai was pretty much the same as in Madurai – in the sense that there was not a single day that I stayed indoors. I was visiting friends and relatives, went to Mahabalipuram, consulted with the skin specialist, and saw Ilaiyaraaja in person (more about the latter in the next post). Even though I stayed for about a fortnight, and traveled around a lot, I could not find time to see some of my very close friends from MCC (Madras Christian College) days. I found some time to go to the college though (sketch 1). I sat at the “botany tank” and did a quick sketch of the café road intersecting the road that leads to Bishop Heber hall. The "botany tank" is a water tank adjacent to the botany department. The tank had a couple of concrete benches underneath - during my B.Sc days at MCC we would monopolize this place and try to convert it into "physics tank". A nerdy friend of mine even wrote several physics equations with chalk on those benches prompting a harsh response from the botany students. As I was sketching I noticed a couple of girls sitting there discussing how so-and-so was the butt of jokes at a party, “Semma ottu ottunaanga theriyuma di?” I shamelessly eavesdropped on them and sighed as they brought back memories of such useless banter (vettippechi) that I had engaged in a decade ago.

My mother wanting me to see the skin specialist was in the back of my mind all the time. Also, the welts pretty much appeared with clockwork regularity every day to remind me of the seriousness of the situation. This specialist is in great demand all over the country. He practices out of his house in Chennai and people queue up – believe it or not – at three in the morning to see him. The doctor does not believe in giving appointments or using the token system. You could be a business magnate or an unemployed person, he makes no distinction, you are to come there and wait in the queue if you seek his treatment.
I went to his house at about 11:00 in the morning and was not surprised to see a serpentine line. There were at least a hundred patients waiting in the line that stretched from the clinic’s door, ran along the corridor, and then spilled out into the garden. The doctor lives in one of those big houses with ancient colonial architecture. The house has a huge Nagalinga maram (the cannonball tree - Couroupita Guianeusis). The tree is an imposing sight with its big leaves, beautiful flowers, and gigantic fruits. Now and then the fruits would fall off – true to the tree's name – like cannons, creating a furor among the patients resting in its shade.

I had prepared myself for a long wait. I brought some snacks, my sketch book, and a novel. I took my place in line and sat on a tree stump. I alternated between sketching and reading while munching on the snacks. I could not help sketching the majestic tree (sketch 2). A mother was deeply absorbed in a book while her child sat by her side playing with a leaf (sketch 3). I could see that the child had the same striking features as the beautiful and dusky mother. The features are lost in the sketch as I could only manage to draw them with their backs to me.

Seeing me engrossed in my sketchbook, the person next to me requested that I draw his portrait (sketch 4). This man has a certificate in sidha medicine and runs a small practice in his town. He joked that as a sidha doctor he could only cure others and was never successful when he tried his own medication. He said that there was no other doctor like this specialist here and praised him to the skies. Following the encomium, he prescribed some medication for my allergies. He said that he would go with the meat reaction theory and doubted the credibility of the heat school of thought.
After a few more sketches (sketches 5 & 6), I took a break and started reading the novel. A lady in line who had obviously seen me sketching asked to see the sketchbook. She went through the book and pointed out the people I had sketched and even passed it around to some of my subjects - the mother and daughter pair.

I was happy when the sidha doctor had liked his portrayal and said he wanted a photocopy of the portrait. But I felt immensely satisfied and flattered when the small child kept looking at the mother-daughter sketch for a long time and said, “adhu naan (That’s me).”