This Week In The Studio 26/2024

I slipped in my reporting for last two weeks but a great side effect of writing these weekly notes was that I had that nagging feeling at the back of my head reminding me of my slippage.

There was a tiny lesson that my piano instructor told me about that fits here.

He said, when we usually get stuck on a part of a melody, we try to start from the beginning of the tune to resume practice again and again. Instead of that, consider the sheet music like a map. When you get stuck in on a junction, just practice going around that junction and move forward. Don’t go back to the beginning of the map and restart from the beginning.

It didn’t feel like much of an advice when I heard it, but when I put it to use, it was gold! So here I am, starting from where I left my weekly notes.

This week in the studio

  1. On Saturday, I logged in to Instagram in the morning to see Harshita’s pictures of the Anomalie Tattoos she had ordered. I already love her current permanent floral tattoos on her arms and the pansies were fitting in so beautifully. When friends find the time to click aesthetic images for your baby brand, I file it under ‘love language’.

2. On Saturday, my godchild returned from her drawing class with a gorgeous surrealistic drawing where she imaged her family as animals and sketched the composition over 12 days. Both - the drawing and her creativity inspired me to pick up my sketch pencils after a week to draw out a composition. Spent a large part of Saturday with Pooja and Deepika and loved hanging out with them after months.

3. I devoured Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors on Saturday all through Sunday. It was one of those books for which I woke up at 4 AM just to relish the last 50 pages in absolute silence of the breaking dawn.

4. After a hiatus of perhaps a decade, on Sunday, I booked a movie ticket just for myself to watch Inside Out -2. I am deeply interested in movies and it is one of the pleasures for me that I delight in partaking solo. I used to constantly go for movies alone while in college and somehow, that practice kept slipping away from me. Felt real good because the movie was also great and I was able to connect to a past version of myself that I believed I had lost.

5. In the last update, I was able to play a rhyme on the piano after reading to sheet music. It is the old, trusty Old MacDonald and I was giddy enough to record it and spam friends and family with it.

Rest of the week has been work mostly and I might have some interesting updates in the coming week regarding that.

Beautiful brand images by Olio Stories

I’ve been a fan of Olio Stories since the time they were making clothes and it’s been a decade now. Everytime they share a brand edit, it drips with authentic honesty that I just can’t ignore. Here is the founder’s maternal grandfather sporting Olio jewels and giving us all kind of goals.

In this age of obsession with being and staying young, these set of images serve as a reminder that fashion isn’t just for the unwrinkled (rather looks lovelier on aged souls).

A Hand Sculpted House in Rishikesh

Came to know about Tiny Farm Lab today and the hand made house they built in Rishikesh.

“Inspired by the birds, bees, and termites,
we wanted to create something sacred with our hands..”
— Tiny Farm Lab

“No one involved in making the house was an architect or an artist, and yet what they created proves otherwise. They say form follows function, but in our case, the form follows the community,”

This week in the studio 22/2024

This entire week was a miracle of a kind. The last week as Friday started approaching on the calendar, I started feeling that despair one gets at the beginning of a flu. When upon waking up, you know in your tired muscles that something isn’t right and that an ailment is imminent - that dread was all over me in the beginning of last week.

Keeping up with it, I did succumb to some flu or a bug that rendered me completely useless for the most part of the last week. On Friday, there was travel planned to Bhutan and even till Thursday evening, I was quite unsure on whether I’ll be able to get up from my bed at all in Bhutan - let alone do hikes and visit monasteries.

I told all the friends who asked to pray for me (one of the firsts) so I could enjoy my holiday and Namrata, who had given me tips on Bhutan promptly replied saying the landscape will heal me.

This week in the studio:

  1. On Friday, Anomalie Tattoos opened up our first physical booth in collaboration with Stab Therapy tattoos at the AYCS, Mumbai. Sending our stock to Mumbai, preparing for the tattoos for display and finally making it to the booth was an experience in itself. When I started receiving pictures of people putting up our tattoos, I couldn’t help but watch the little videos on repeat.

  2. It was on Friday also that I took the flight to Paro, Bhutan from Kolkata with Paras for a 5 night, 6 day stay in Bhutan. I had done some preparation by reading this book written by the Queen Mother, Treasures Of The Thunder Dragon the previous week. Reading about a culture before I had the opportunity to experience it proved to be an eye opener for me. I was able to follow the stories and the gravity of rituals as our guide was explaining and as a practice, if I can continue to do the same pre-work prior to all my travels, I’ll be enriching my experience manyfold.

  3. First day in Bhutan was eventful as we managed to see a 15th century monastery connected with a 600 year old bridge, confluence of two rivers, ate my first Ema datshi with fried rice (Bhutan’s National Dish), witnessed the surreal Buddha Dordenma statue, went to a Takin reserve (Bhutan’s National Animal) and wrapped up the day by going to a local pub where a fantastic band was playing! I admit even writing this down is unbelievable because I have become a one-outdoor activity per day kind of person, but given that we weren’t making decisions on the next stop and had an excellent guide plus that sweet sweet mountain air, we did get carried away.

  4. On Saturday, it was time to move to Punakha and the founder of the travel agency had invited a bunch of people travelling through their agency for a local lunch at his home. I met three women travellers during the lunch, one of whom had come from Nepal having finished the trek to Everest Base Camp and the ATC trail. It was quite inspiring to hear her stories. I also had my first butter tea and fresh cheese momos in the country.

  5. On Saturday, after reaching Punakha, I had requested a session with a monk and we met up with Monk Kinley Wangchuk. For about an hour and a half, I heard Buddhist philosophy and teachings by him on the subjectivity of our gaze and Buddhist thoughts on eating meat, how to live a Buddhist life without becoming a monk.

  6. The highlight of Sunday was waking up in the mountains of Punakha and getting to finish a small drawing before starting the day. I had taken my entire set of 72 coloured pencils and getting in a drawing while having a great coffee with a view made it worthwhile.

  7. While sightseeing happened over the course of the next few days and I was lucky to visit some key places in Punakha such as the Punakha dzong, the suspension bridge and a gorgeous nunnery before leaving drenched in rains.

  8. On the last day in Bhutan, the trek to Tiger’s Nest was a highlight that trumped over the entire stay. Done over 7 hours and to an elevation of 10,000 ft above sea level. It was physically the most exhausting thing I had undertaken ever and during the descent, there came a time when my fingers were completely cold and my right foot was shaking uncontrollably. I have seen movies where a transformative journey takes place through a taxing trek and I did come close to understanding the feeling. I have more written in my journal about the trek. Till three days after the trek, I was limping with sore legs and now that the soreness has subsided, I can look back at the journey and understand how in its beauty, it had the potential for healing.

  9. Reading Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami has been an experience that I can only describe as floating over an endless shallow river. How are Japanese writers able to movie so swiftly through dreams and reality? Is it the closeness to nature? Or is the DNA of the literature?


This week in the studio 20/2024

This year is racing past like a rabbit on steroids and every now and then, I reflect on the weeks going back, take a deep sigh and move on with the next task on my plate.

Given the ongoing guilt I feel of not examining/reflecting enough, this weekly writing is the least I can commit to, for my own sanity. I also got inspired by a similar weekly writing project by a friend who also seems to be on a similar documentation path in life.

This week in the studio

  1. Last Saturday, Satya didi, our cook plucked almost five kilos of mangoes from the tree that’s right outside our balcony. I had been eyeing the mangoes ever since they started ripening but I didn’t imagine that’s how many they’ll turn out to be. Looking at the plucked harvest, I went back to see that there were almost double of the harvested amount still hanging from the tree. I am not adept at thinking of the delicacies to be made (generally not creative in the kitchen and not a foodie for sure) so the task of putting all these mangoes to good use is left to Satya didi.



2. On Saturday, after a hiatus of more than a year, I was able to organise a small ‘Drawing Room’ session with friends. We got with the initial intention of making collages but ended up drawing zines. These sessions had become a weekly activity in 2022-23 and somehow I loosened my grip on it and the sessions made way for just house parties. Anyway, with this session, Kenneth got a lot of great coffees to brew along with a substantial brewing equipment and Noopur, Rasagy, Paras and I got the pleasure of sipping on amazing coffee while drawing.

3. After much back and forth (a little heated back and forth), I finally received the packaging envelopes for my independent temp tattoo brand, Anomalie Tattoo Co and knew that the rest of the week was going to be spent in packing orders and dispatching them. Specially because customers had started asking for their order updates and I was losing patience rapidly. So when the envelopes finally arrived, I hugged them for good luck and started dispatching our first tattoos to customers!

4. I went to Spirit Forward, a bar that was taken over by a Goan bar, Grumps. Its not usual that I feel the need to go out for a drink but I was positively grumpy that day and felt that a yummy drink could fix my mood. Fix it did actually. The cocktails were quite yummy but I ended up eating a wild mushroom dish that made the next day quite unbearable for me in the stomach department.

5. I received the hand tufted rugs made from my drawings and without any shame, I was smitten the moment I set my eyes on them. There’s definitely more of them coming specially with how they came out.

Writing this on a Friday night going through the phone photo gallery made me acutely aware of how documenting our lives and reflecting on them can stretch the fabric of time, albeit a little bit.


Studio MAMA

Saw this mini documentary on Studio Mama, a London based architectural and furniture design studio run by wife-husband duo. In this documentary, they show the delightful designs they are able to make from waste. I might be a sucker for Scandinavian design after all.

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You'll be happier. Daniel Lombroso’s short film follows a patient as she goes under the knife.

The Brazilian Butt lift is the world’s most dangerous cosmetic surgery procedure with 1 in 3000 patients dying from it.

Daniel Lombroso (https://www.instagram.com/dlumbo/) a Director and a Journalist made this short film following a patient as she prepared herself, convinced herself to go through the Brazilian Butt Lift surgery.

What struck me the most was the words by the surgeon as he prepared her for the surgery.

“You’ll be happier.”

A quote on the inconceivable nature of reality as discovered by 23 year old Werner Heisenberg in the solitude of an island

Werner Heisenberg, a 23 year old German Theoretical Physicist went to an archipelago to recover from hay fever. Helgoland is an island with no trees, hence no pollen.

There, he discovered a mathematical structure of denoting atomic reality which by itself is some sort of an oddity and yet which tended to compute correct results in predicting the outputs of experiments and now are used in quantum computers and atomic bombs.

One quote from the book, Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli is particularly fascinating because I read the name, Buddha in a book of Quantum Physics.

“
An electron is a particular type of regularity that appears among measurements and observations that we make. It is more pattern than a substance. It is order...Thus we arrive at a strange place. We break things down into smaller and smaller pieces, but then the pieces, when examined, are not there. Just the arrangements of them are. What then, are things, like the boat, or its sails, or your fingernails? What are they? If things are forms of forms of forms of forms, and if forms are order, and order is defined by us..they exist, it would appear, only as created by, and in relation to, us and the Universe. They are, the Buddha might say, emptiness.
”
— Cosmological Koans, Anthony Aguirre

21 days of meditation drawings

I have a selfish relationship with meditation. A little too selfish. Whenever I am in a deep rut, I run to it like a fish without water. I would meditate for an hour, sleep with meditation music on, take frequent breaks to tune into 5 minutes of guided meditations. You get the drift.

It works too. I feel connected to myself, my deepest sense of existence and I am able to tap into some unknown source of stability that is usually able to drag me out of dark places.

However, I also know that in order to nourish a mindspace where its easier to respond to emotions, this streak of selfish meditations must give way to a continuous practise.

Sometime in late 2020 though, I started drawing immediately after a meditation session. With no expectation of form and shape, I was able to return to a pure play of colour. Sometimes I would draw the shapes I saw when my eyes were closed during meditation and sometimes I would draw along as a guided meditation played along.

Today, as I was listening to my favourite Buddhist teacher on YouTube: Nick Keomahavong, he suggested to use chanting as a way of meditation. He also suggested to try chanting for 21 days to reap the benefits.

I immediately reflected back to my days of drawing my meditations and how I loved the process of a quiet reflection looking internally and then putting to paper forms and colours that I experienced during the process.

I want to go back to the same feeling and hence, this project. 21 days of meditation drawings.

A drawing from the book Tantra Song - one of the only books to survey the elusive tradition of abstract Tantric painting from Rajasthan, India—sold out in a swift six weeks. Rendered by hand on found pieces of paper and used primarily for meditation, the works depict deities as geometric, vividly hued shapes and mark a clear departure from Tantric art’s better-known figurative styles. They also resonate uncannily with lineages of twentieth-century art—from the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism to Minimalism—as well as with much painting today. Rarely have the ancient and the modern come together so fluidly. Read more about these meditation paintings here

Watched Tove finally.

Woke up early, bleeding. Found the movie and watched it. Found it average. Did not speak to me other than the studio scenes that are recreated.

A shot from director Zaida Bergroth’s "Tove," filmed on Kodak 16mm by DP Linda Wassberg. Photo by Sami Kuokkanen.

What is an artist's life?

I am reading the biography of Tove Jansson, the Finnish artist who drew the wildly famous characters of Moomins. After having watched the trailer of her biopic by Zaida Bergroth, I certainly have been hooked.

After rummaging through youtube for all the documentaries available, I finally decided to turn to the books (never a disappointing decision). In this one, there is a mention of hundreds of letters that Tove is writing to her art school friends and her lovers - mostly about her life growing up the world war 2 years, but also her decisions on art. I couldn’t help but feel slightly jealous. I haven’t been to art school ( a decision I don’t regret as I think its only now in my third decade that I have concrete feelings about things to say something about them). Hence, I don’t know a lot of my contemporaries with whom I share my views on art, discuss works or plan shows.

There are a few friends who are on the same path as mine for sure, but for now, it does feel like a solitary road.

Writing I’ve found is a detox for the mind. When I write, I vacuum clean my brain of all the old dust of thoughts and ideas and plans and dreams and make way for new dust. Hence, I thought of writing about my journey here. Hopefully, I’ll find more artists willing to connect and share their thoughts. If not, I’ll have a really clean mind :D

Week 24: The year is half empty or half full?

A numbered list of stuff I was upto this week

  1. Watched three and a half movies

    1. The Personal History of David Copperfield (couldn’t finish, found it a little too obnoxious for my taste.)

    2. Amal: Liked the story and the situations the characters find themselves in. Couldn't find the diction of the leading character matching the language of the city the film is based in. Found it uncanny. Enjoyed the film nonetheless.

    3. A Woman in Berlin: Got to know about this aspect of the second world war. Based on a book by the same name, the movie speaks about the time when the Soviet army occupied Berlin during the tail end of WW|| and raping women in Berlin as victory hauls. A moving film that did justice to both sides of the story.

      More can be read here -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany

    4. Shiva Baby: Gorgeous movie set in a single day. A bi-sexual girl fighting her emotions about her sugar daddy. Loved all performances!

  2. Tried some experiments in the kitchen, thanks to a gift I got: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

    1. Made peach syrup for the first time. 5 peaches boiled with loads of jaggery to be mixed with soda for spritzers/lemonades

    2. Did the prep for Cherry infused gin and it should take 20 more days to be ready.

  3. Lost a wisdom tooth :(

  4. Worked a lot. Which explains why this list is so short.

  5. Have set aside a budget for trauma therapy for girls between the ages of 15-25 who lost a parent to Covid19. Really hoping it helps someone.

4 weeks of uselessness

Hello friends,

Sabbatical comes from the Hebrew word shabbat (שבת) (i.e., Sabbath), in Latin: sabbaticus, in Greek: sabbatikos (σαββατικός)) which is a rest or break from work.

Although a sabbatical is a longer break, colloquially translating to months and months of break, I started with a 4-week break to understand my readiness for a sufficient swathe of time that was directly in my control. I did not want to impose a project on this break primarily because it would have ended up becoming a cause of stress for me and would have undid the very reason of this break in the first place.

While I am writing about my experience of 4 weeks of not ‘doing anything’, I am fully aware that taking a break this long at my age is a privilege I haven’t seen any woman around me exercise. My mother, in her thirty eight years of working never once took a holiday that wasn’t due to a health emergency or a health emergency in family. The prospect of her taking off on an extended break from work to ‘heal’ was neither in the landscape of thought nor was uttered as a passing phrase.

When she would have been the age I am, I would have crossed over from primary school to middle school. I would have exchanged our primary uniform of a mauve frock worn over a white cotton blouse to now a mauve skirt whose ascending lengths were proving to be an issue of torment for our teachers in our all-girls school. In my fifth standard, my mother was so struck by the domestic demands and her job that she told me flatly about her absolute inability to take the responsibility for my studies. I would now have to study by myself. Perhaps, that decision would have given some break to her?

Before I went on this break, I could feel myself spiralling down again. I was mentally exhausted and it showed every other day in some form of ache and pain. In the three weeks leading up to my sabbatical, I was popping pain killers almost every other day again. Every night one could see the wire of a heating pad dangling from where I would sleep and I would wake up nauseated. Things would settle down by the time of my work meetings and it would repeat all over again.

So immersed was I in the narrative of work and its meaning that I had never taken the time to disentangle my being from the productivity of my body and mind. In the last ten years and going back further, I had fully made myself believe that not working in an office for a job that was paying me would be the very definition of ‘uselessness’. This false construct of work as tied to the direct economic merit was not only going against my felt experience, but was actively dispiriting.

These four weeks were the first intentional break of my professional life thus far and I didn’t want to actively pass a judgement on it. So I have compiled a list of things I did in my 4 weeks of uselessness for you to form your own judgements.

  1. Went on a drive 423 Kms away from my place passing through the majestic western ghats

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2. Drew by the beach side for two weeks every day

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3. Documented the patterns of sand bubbler crabs

In sandy beaches of certain tropical beaches in Indo-Pacific lives a tiny crab whose feeding habits creates intricate patterns consisting of thousands of sand balls on the beach.

When the high tide goes off, these crabs start to nibble on the thin coating of organic matter on sand grains. Can you believe it? They nibble on the coating of organic matter on grains of sand! As they keep burrowing deeper into the sand, they keep nibbling and pressing the excess into a ball which they kick out of their burrows.

The result are gorgeous patterns of sand balls on the beach.

4. Saw the evening blending into night

All photos were taken a few minutes apart.

5. Re-read a book and drew a project from it

I am fascinated by words and love to incorporate it into my drawing work. While re-reading The Collected Schizophrenias, I highlighted text - passing passages, beautifully constructed phrases for a drawing project I will be undertaking on the book.

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6. Witnessed the great conjunction

A great conjunction is a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn, when the two planets appear closest together in the sky. Great conjunctions occur approximately every 20 years when Jupiter "overtakes" Saturn in its orbit. They are named "great" for being by far the rarest of the conjunctions between naked-eye planets

I was extremely lucky to spot this event with the naked eye (along with some help from a star gazing app) The photographs from my phone didn’t come out well so these are the screenshots from the star gazing app confirming that it was indeed Jupiter that we were looking at.

12. FONDEST SUNSET

My mother has never been to Goa or to a beach city. We had made plans for her travel now that she is no longer working but 2020 came along and did what it did to everyone’s plans. One evening as I was strolling along the beach at sunset, I decided to video call mom. As I flipped the camera towards the beach, her excitement at seeing the setting sun was evident. So that evening, I kept the video on as she saw a sunset on the beach for the first time. As the sky kept changing colours, I kept showing her the waves, the sky and the last rays of the setting sun.

It wasn’t any close to what she would feel seeing the real thing - but the way she reacted on even witnessing it with me on a video call was extremely precious.

7. Slept for nine hours. Every single day!

Somedays, I would have slept for more. Who knows :)

8. Started running everyday

I am glad that I discovered running and that discovery happened on a beach. I started running early morning barefoot on the beautiful beach and loved the feeling. I used to be concerned about the impact of running on my already inflamed body, but given that I was eating healthy, was not stressed at all and was meditating, running proved to be a beautiful form of exercise.

9. Made my acquaintance with Ruth Asawa

By a stroke of luck as I was ordering a few books online, a book on Ruth Asawa caught my eye. I hadn’t known about her or her work and given that it was a weighty book, had decided to chug it along for my Goa stay. For the first week of the break, I was curled up in the life of Ruth Asawa, her questions on identity and her insistence on living on her own terms.

This is the book I was reading. Everything She Touched and would recommend it to anyone who wishes to make an enquiry into a gorgeous hand made life.

Image taken from ruthasawa.com

Image taken from ruthasawa.com

10. Spent an afternoon in an independent bookstore

When it comes to bookstores, I can never get out of it fully content. You can leave me for two hours or twenty minutes, I’ll only come out grumpy at all the shelves I couldn’t see. I absolutely have to scan almost every book before deciding to move on. Could it be a disease? May be so! So when I took an entire day to visit the Literati Bookstore and Cafe in Calangute. I didn’t have anything else planned for the day and given the size of the bookstore, was able to scan the collection twice :D

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11. Finished reading a book in two days

Because I have mentioned this in my highlights, you would know that this is important to me. Not for flexing that I can read through 300+ pages in two days but for the stretch of time and consistent focus that tends to slips so fast nowadays. It felt really really nice to not do anything but just sit down with a book engrossed in the story and finish reading it without any distractions (other than long naps).

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13. Discovered the quiet magic of flaneuring

In the apartment complex where I stay, every evening hoardes of neighbours come out for their evening walk. It is a small complex and people keep walking around in the complex in circles. Going in circles round and round sometimes for hours. I did that as well. During the lockdown, getting out was not possible but when it is now, I did understand it was a peculiar habit. There is an entire world to be discovered in the neighbourhood. New shops keep mushrooming and shutting, there are florists and fruit sellers on bicycles, houses with overgrown gardens and sounds and scents of varying degrees.

Why did I keep walking in circles? Why didn’t I walk in my neighbourhood instead?

I changed that in my break. Flaneuring is the act of strolling or simply a mindful wander. During the break, I started on long, sometimes solitary walks in Goa and around my house.

14. started a book giveaway and gave away 70% of my wardrobe

I have had a very patchy relationship with fashion. Growing up, I never really cared much about it and now as a grown up (aargh), I find it at best a functional obligation so far. Even then, I had a cupboard full of clothes most of which were not worn or ones that I kept for the time I was going to trim down. I just said goodbye to them and packed them for a giveaway.

My aim for my wardrobe is to limit it to 10 items per season. Given that I stay in a city which is summers the entire year round, I need to trim down my wardrobe considerably. I am still in search of a good capsule wardrobe to follow and would continue on this journey of simplifying this year.

With books the relationship is more love-love making it harder to part ways with. I picked up the books I had read and I was sure I wasn’t going to read again and started a book giveaway. Posted them on my instagram stories and just gave them away to readers in my city. Did that for 30 books so far and I have lots more to give!

15. DREW EVERYDAY

Drawings are still packed in the sketchbooks and need to be put into through the raging laser eyes of my scanner. Those would follow.

So yeah, this is the record of my useless moments over the last four weeks. I am leaving you all with two pictures - a morning and a sunset that I witnessed from where I was for two weeks.

I wish you a year that is intentional, deliberate and has room for growth. Happy 2021!







From the studio: The week of awakening

Hello to whoever is reading this :)

Last week on Sunday, I decided to go to a nearby hiking spot. I had only climbed a handful of steps that I lost sensation in my legs. It was bad enough that I had to sit out the entire time clicking pictures of the sky and seeing people huffing and puffing their way through to the top of the hill.

At that moment, I felt nothing but pity on myself and my body. To be sitting there, breathless and numb was very painful to admit. The days that have followed have not seen me operating in 100% capacity. I still feel fatigued, unable to sometimes walk for more than 2000 steps at a time and chained with nausea.

In times like these, it is the hardest to feel kind for yourself and to give your pain the acknowledgement it deserves. However, I have set myself a very small yet challenging-enough goal and I do end up ticking it off on most days.

Full moon

Monday was full moon night and I wanted to take a breather from overthinking and sit with the moonrise. Indigenous cultures have dedicated rituals around the lunar cycle and specially around the full moon. While I am yet to discover these beliefs of cleansing myself, I did discover that aligning yourself with cycles gives you a sense of mark making in time.

Just like celebrating birthdays that come once a year, a full moon occurs every month and can be a natural mark to stop in your tracks, reflect and realign with your intention for the next month. It is easy to imagine in the cultures where there was no clock, a full moon would mark a new beginning and thus, would call for a celebration.

I laid out fairy lights in my balcony and spent more than two hours just sitting with the moon seeing it rise in the sky. Here are a few pictures with Orbit enjoying her full moon ritual.

Exploring paper

This week, I started exploring making on different kinds of paper. I am a paper hoarder and find it hard to part ways with any nice packaging paper but when it comes to drawing, I don’t experiment often. I have been feeling stuck on that for quite a bit and considering only I could get myself out of it, I gathered a few papers around and just starting drawing on them.

  1. Golden cardboard paper is from a bakery used as solid base for pastries.

  2. From a sketchbook with a few pages left

  3. The packaging of a dress that my brother gifted me (I am the luckiest sister in the world)

  4. A butter paper that was in the folds of my dress

I thoroughly loved working with the fragile papers and felt a close connection with my drawing and the medium. I’ll continue this series as much as I can.

Reading

I am still reading Lust for Life (1934) a biographical novel written by Irving Stone about the life of the famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and his life and work. The book is a gorgeous biography and I also created a few pages of art journals based on the quotes in the book (which would have been taken directly from Van Gogh’s letters) and will write a separate post on the book when I am finished with it. Reading a book published in 1934 is a fascinating journey into that time and it helps to see what was acceptable during that time.

It does get easy to drown in the cultural artefacts of today, especially when it comes to reading choices but I’ve had a great time reading books that were published before I was born.

In the spirit of Vincent, listen to Starry Starry Night on Youtube :)

Listening

It had been some time that I heard the podcast ‘Art For Your Ears’ by the Jealous Curator. This week, I heard Danielle talking to Petah Coyen. Her work is big, bold and gorgeous and what I loooved hearing from an established artist was her journey. She tells about years and years where she was making bad art and how it was a battle of time with her full time job and her art.

I am going to have to hear that episode once again and make an attention map out of it. It was pure gold!

I’ll leave you with the four of the five panels I drew a while back.

Thanks for reading! Hope you have a lovely week :)

About the ‘From the Studio’

This is a letter that I intend to publish every Sunday. My wish is not only to look backwards in reflection but to use the reflection as a guiding principle for the next week. I am impacted by influences every moment of the day — literature, spoken word, cinema, fellow humans and my work. I am hoping to use this space as the vessel to share all the beauty I found in the world that week.

From the studio: The week of intention

I started 2020 with a big resolve and ambition. To not overthink and just create indiscriminately. At the beginning of the year, I was able to blog for 15 odd days when the reality of Covid hit all of us — indiscriminately.

For the longest part of the initial months of lockdown, I was turbocharged into the black hole of domestic work and just trying to survive with my cooking. I saw with my eyes, dust settling in crevices that I turned a blind eye to, some cob webs getting larger and small hillocks of dishes and unironed clothes got bigger.

Now, it is almost the end of this year and I wanted to pick up the pieces again and hobble along.

This is what happened in the studio this week:

  • My endometriosis flared up along with a continuation of the flu. I got tested for Covid-19 and while the test came negative, the healthcare worker conducting the test drove the swab so deep that it hit a nerve behind my eye and there was an additional eye to nurse along with my broken body. It was difficult sitting down for more than 20 minutes at a stretch, it was difficult walking, back and knee were sore and my spirits were really rock bottom.

    Its when I am completely down and about, there wakes up a part of me that wants to rebel against my own body. I usually crash early and wake up early and head straight to the studio table. This collage is a product of that rebellion.

  • Watched HillBilly Elegy - a movie based on a book I wanted to read but just didn’t get the time. The performances shook me and I did move back and forth from my childhood to the present moment.

  • Also binged on Dash and Lily. Am I ashamed of binging on teenage romance? Never!

  • I have been reading Lust for Life, a biographical novel written in 1934 by Irving Stone on the life of Vincent Van Gogh. I have a very battered copy of it and some of the pages keep jumping out of the binding no matter how delicately I handle the book. I find the writing lucid and find it hard to not daydream about the time when Vincent wasn’t the most famous Van Gogh.

  • This week, I worked on an original drawing of an attention map made with my own words. After drawing a lot with other (wiser) people’s words, writing my own was fun.

  • To end, I am attaching a few pictures of another sketchbook where I spent most of 21st November with.

About the ‘From the Studio’

This is a letter that I intend to publish every Sunday. My wish is not only to look backwards in reflection but to use the reflection as a guiding principle for the next week. I am impacted by influences every moment of the day — literature, spoken word, cinema, fellow humans and my work. I am hoping to use this space as the vessel to share all the beauty I found in the world that week.

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Days 20-31: Being in the belly of the whale

Every day, at 9 PM sharp, my feet start losing sensation and my hands start losing any will to work. In the last ten days, I have carried on, absorbing my own chaos and matching it with the world’s.

Suddenly, April looks dangerously different. Suddenly, life looks dangerously precarious.

I read this piece by Dan Albergotti

Things to do in the belly of the whale

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life's ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

"Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale" by Dan Albergotti from The Boatloads.© BOA Editions, Ltd., 2008.

I am trying to do everything you said and a little bit more.

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Day 11-19 Eight days of looking back at myself

Have you seen Jojo Rabbit?

Elsa, the Jewish girl is hiding in a cupboard. The cupboard is dark and stinky. She is separated from her family and her love. Perhaps, she has lost her family and with the spite and anger diverted at her community, she is living through a loss that is almost unimaginably suffocating.

She is but a teenage girl, in the prime of her life and the world around her is crumbling down to pieces she can’t pick and make sense of.

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Children assume love to be the default mode of the world around them - their mothers loved them enough to not let them die of negligence and their fathers loved them enough to be around as an additional care taker and this normalcy of feeling, when tested tears to shreds the model of the world they’ve been weaving all along. Hate must literally destroy our cells, I believe. Was it destroying Elsa’s cells too?

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When you can’t hold onto anything, what do you hold onto?

Hold onto that thought. Being stuck at home isn’t the best thing to happen for me in the last one week - and in between work, cooking, washing dishes and washing more dishes, I am more irritable and tired as usual. It was surprising when I started looking back at my selfies from two years back.

It seemed a distance of a lifetime had to be crossed between that girl and the woman I am now. I seemed to be holding onto dear life - and barely so. I decided to walk the steps of these two years to meet her again - between today and that day. To hold onto her.

This is how the meeting went.

Day 4-10 Six days of drawing and collecting shiny confetti from the universe

A week flew by in the haze of news of Corona virus infecting the world’s blood streams. Fortunately, I was able to snatch enough time during my days to put my pen to paper everyday to make something that came from a deeper place.

I’ll be putting up some of the completed drawings up on the home page directly. Here are seven drawings I made in the last five days.

There is a story about a shiny confetti in this post.

During travels, it is impossible to pack along a long list of stationary items. I have also observed a long list of stationary items, even if packed, are instead a hinderance to creating something in pockets of time one gets while travelling.

In order to invoke the merciful goddess of creativity-under-constraints, I only packed a black notebook, two white ink pens, an adhesive tape and a glue stick.

On the first day of my stay while walking to the beach, I saw amongst the organic debris of twigs, dried leaves and tree bark, a shiny glittery coin shaped object bouncing off the Goan sunlight. I looked closely to confirm that it was a piece of shiny confetti that must have floated off by the wind and deposited in this absolutely random point. I thought to myself, oh, it’ll fly off by the time I am back - the wind will take it off and I’ll never see it again.

That didn’t happen.

I saw it wedged firmly on the sand the next day too. This time, I picked it up considering it a bright, shiny, glittery gift from the universe - a gift for my sketchbook. I pasted it on one of the pages and admired how it reflected the light as it sat firmly on my sketchbook.

Guess what happened the next day?

As I walked to the beach with my sketchbook and stationary pouch, I saw another one of this confetti landed just a few inches from where I found its sister the other day. I looked at, smiled and picked it up to paste it on another drawing.

The next day, I found another one, another one the day after that and another one the day after that!

For everyday I drew, I found this confetti waiting for me to pick it up, to be stuck along nicely in one of the drawings.

Today, as I checked out and walked towards the exit, guess what I found! Two confetti circles this time! Locked up in the same position, reflecting the Goan sunlight, hidden enough from the prying eyes of kids yet visible enough for my peering eyes.

Those two drawings are yet to be made. I’ll update this set of drawings here as a notebook.

Thank you universe, for sending me a reminder of a treasure everyday can hold — only if I look closely and have the courage to claim it for myself.

Day 2+3/366 Balacing stones and painted beads

I saw a video about balancing stones first from Jonna Jinton - a Swedish photographer and artist who moved to a small village in Sweden that has 10 inhabitants. I have spent quite a many evenings after work and quite a many mornings with her videos getting inspired by her.

I have a small collection of stones of interesting shapes and colours from different beaches I’ve visited. They’ve been wrapped in various bags and kept in the recesses of various drawers so far. I decided to revisit them and see if I could change their form into something else.

So I did. Used a few drops of a fast glue and made these three tiny sculptures mimicking balacing stones.

On day three, I dusted my collection of wooden beads that I was quite fascinated with some years ago and decided to paint them to make necklaces. Turns out, I still enjoy the process of painting those beads tremendously. Sadly, I didn’t have any string to string them on and had to steal from the burlap string that my cat plays with (Sorry Orbit :P)

I have a feeling I’m going to go in the rabbit hole of making these necklaces again!

Now, I have to rack my brains on what to make for today! Off I go :)

Day 1/366 Embroidery Loop

I am sitting in the lotus position today, dutifully reporting on the first day of the Year of the maker rat. Before I start the day’s reportage, I just happened to browse through the Julie/Julia project to make a comparison of our projects (You’ll know me through this, I am competitive in weirdest of ways)

Julie Powell started on a similar project of cooking through 524 recipes in 365 days! Considering I’ve picked a similar number, I realise how utterly daunting this task is - however, I also am able to drive some strength from the fact that Julie was indeed able to finish her project.

What is harder? Making 524 recipes or making 500 arty things? We’ll only know with time.

For now, I call upon the compassion of this mother of yearly projects to bless me with the strength and tons and tons of ideas to make!

Now for the reporting, yesterday, I finished making this embroidery loop. I had started working on this over the last weekend and this was left unfinished when I squeezed a trip to Delhi and back. In the evening though, as I was surrounded by friends passing on information on the newest vegan protein powders, my hands kept moving in a state of trance to finish this piece.