A sketch exchange

I'm taking part in a sketch exchange organised by Kip Bradley who is a fellow urban sketcher. He organised one on Flickr a few months ago and I missed out on that one so this time was quick to put my hand up.
It basically works like this: a whole bunch of people volunteer to take part and once the numbers are finalised, Kip sends each of us a personal message with an address in it and a deadline by which to send your sketch to that address.

The theme was to sketch cultural markers of place rather than landmarks or architectural markers. I've always been fascinated with Kolams and how effortlessly my mother and grandmothers could do these.

I put this  sketch in the mail today. I am not supposed to disclose who I am sending this to and I have no idea who's sketch I will receive in return but there are 24 participants from 13 countries so its exciting!
If you want to know what I get or where this sketch of mine went, watch out for comments to this post later.

A Trip to the Zoo

This sunday the penciljammers in Madras decided to meet at Vandalur Zoo. I hadn't been there in almost twenty years and only hazily  remembered a vast scorching expanse of tarmac more than anything else. Thankfully in the past two decades the trees have grown.

Most animal enclosures are reasonably generous with a lot of trees and shade for the animals. People can't get too close with double lines of fencing and walls and then moats. So we sort of squinted and approximated and sketched what we could. 

The weather was merciless. Thankfully Nithya hit upon an idea of hiring one of the battery operated vans exclusively for the sketching group. We had it for only one hour and had to do the whole circuit and be back within that time, so when we saw something interesting we would all hop out yelling to the driver "just two minutes" and mostly we were back in the van in five minutes and off again. 

 It was unimaginably crowded and most people had never seen sketchers before so we sometimes attracted more attention than the animals.  I had taken 4 water brushes with pre-mixed colours filled in it so that I could sketch and paint quickly standing up. It worked out well except the colours were a bit diluted and I had a very limited colour palette to work with. But it sure beat lugging my entire kit around in the heat!

Happy Labour Day

As luck would have it, I just did this sketch last sunday. How appropriate and convenient to post on Labour Day. The statue on the left is one of the northern-most along the Marina and a personal favourite. Its called the Triumph of Labour.

The grand looking building at the back is the University Senate House built in the 1870s by Robert Chisholm. It has beautiful proportions, intricate ornamentation and chettinad egg plastered walls that are as smooth as polished stone.

Crumbling and neglected for many years, it was restored at great cost with the help of INTACH and conservation architects a few years back. A lot of people came forward and supported this. The idea and the hope was to see it being used again, opened out to the public for exhibitions and gatherings. But now that the restoration is complete it is back in the hands of the Madras University and it's hierarchical power structure. I hope that at least interested public are allowed to visit in the future

The TV tower seen behind everything is from the good old days of Doordarshan.

It was blisteringly hot that morning and I huddled under the shade of a tiny hand cart which was closed and boarded up. This time I got a lot of interesting comments from passersby who were free and happy with their advice. Someone asked if he could take my picture. I asked if he wanted a picture of me or the sketch and he said "of you doing the sketch". Thank you.

Hotel DuParc

In the 17th Century, in the heart of the French quarters of Pondicherry, this house called Villa Selvom was built as an annexe to the French Governor's residence. It has changed hands many times since and has now reinvented itself as Hotel DuParc - a compact and cosy boutique hotel. I stayed there for a couple of days and it was a treat. The location is the best part of it, as you walk out of the gate and find yourself a stones throw away from the ashram, the park the beach and the bazaar.

Like most old residences of the French quarters, you step through an archway in a high compound wall and into a lovely little tropical courtyard full of potted plants and large flagstone paving. The polished cement pots were of an aquamarine colour - this sketch doesn't do them justice. This is the view from my room on the first floor.

Unidentified Yellow Object

This sketch was done just a couple of buildings down from my previous post. It is less about the building and  focuses more on the machinery which fascinated me. The scale of all these assorted cranes, drilling cabling, hissing machines which move with their own slow purposeful rhythms is quite something. This one had two large cylindrical spools. One with a pair of articulated chains and the other with a fat cable.

One tends to forget that it is operated by a tiny human sitting somewhere in it's bowels. In any case we can't see him or the other hundred helmet-clad individuals who are working under grueling conditions when we usually whiz past the barricades on this stretch of Mount road. 

In the hope of making this post more interesting I endlessly searched the web to try to identify this machine coming up with more and more hilarious search phrases but I just couldn't identify it. If anyone knows what this thing is called please do let me know!

Higginbothams.....What looms ahead?

Last sunday morning I managed to sketch something I've been meaning to capture for a long time now. On the arterial and busy Mount Road there has been hectic construction activity for the last couple of years as Chennai hopes to have the first phase of its Metro Rail Project up and running by year end.

Mount Road is one of the five old arterial roads radiating outward from Fort St George, it was a major road when Madras was the capital of the British colony of India and still has several old buildings on it. Hopefully the metro rail in this area will be completely underground and one hopes further that the structures put up as station entry and exit points are done sensitively keeping heritage structures in mind. One can only hope, though, as such plans are not very openly shared in the public realm in this country.

I had particularly wanted to draw this building - Higginbothams - as it is India's oldest bookshop in existence. Yes, that is right! Built in 1844, it has stood to this day housing books of all kinds and even until twenty five years ago it was the place to go to for book lovers.

Soon after it was built, Lord Trevelyan, who was the Governor of Madras wrote :
"Among the many elusive and indescribable charms of life in Madras City, is the existence of my favourite book shop 'Higginbotham's' on Mount Road. In this bookshop I can see beautiful editions of the works of Socrates, Plato, Euripides, Aristophanes, Pindar, Horace, Petrarch, Tasso, Camoyens, Calderon and Racine. I can get the latest editions of Victor Hugo, the great French novelist. Amongst the German writers, I can have Schiller and Goethe. Altogether a delightful place for the casual browser and a serious book lover"

Today, digital technology, the internet, e-books, the ipad and the kindle are elbowing out the good old paperback while at the same time, over-crowded cities bursting at the seams and choked with traffic jams are trying to magically bring in the infrastructure that was never planned for.

Lets hope the metro project has been planned well. Lets hope the project is completed despite whatever the result of the next election, and lets hope it works beautifully for the citizens of this city.

A messy kitchen

Yup. That's a messy sketch of my messy kitchen. I bought a set of markers a while ago and this sunday I wasn't able to go outdoors to try them out. I realised that the vanishing point for the door and the sink are not the same but alas! This is not graphite. No erasing.