Nature abstracts

Like most people I know, I used to make fun of abstract paintings :) ..as in you could get away with positioning scribbles as art :) But I have always been curious to find out what abstract art could really mean.

So I started exprimenting with abstraction and have done a few paintings this past year...

My initial attempts were just color play ...using a limited pallette, and without any specific object in mind, I started to paint as my hand would lead me, and 'Hope' is the result of that. It was great experience in just understanding colours, blending, and brush strokes.

I was satisfied with the end result, but I was not willing to accept yet that this is all what 'abstract' art is.

It was also about the same time that I had done 'Bamboos' - this was the beginning of what I would like to classify as 'nature abstracts'. In this painting, I was'nt focussed on makingan exact replica of the Banboo shoots itself ...not to try and replicate the size/ proportion of the actual shoots...instead I focussed on what inspired me about the bamboos - the angles, and the color variations.

Soon after this, I did "Summer rain" - again, my approach was to focus on what the particular object/ scenery/ moment had that was inspiring me to draw/ paint....in this case it was pattern of the drops falling on the window pane, and how thery merged into small streams of water.

These were all done almost a year back, and after that I had not attempted abstracts until very recently.

With "Dancers" - I tried this again - this was inspired by a photo of 2 Rajasthani dancers - there was a lot of movement / color and the swirls of their skirts was very insteresting. That is what I wanted to capture in the painting - I wanted to convey movement, and color, and hence there is no detail of the women's face.

This - the "Gulmohar canopy" - was inspired by a photo a friend had posted on Facebook (sorry, I can't remember who it was ...it was a very beautiful photo..so Thanks, friend) - The wonderful , randomness of the branches, the speckles of flowers and leaves - was irresistible ...I had to paint it :)

This time I got a little adventurous, and tried this on a 2 ft by 2feet canvas...I wanted the focus to remain on the few main branches, and capture the randomness of the smaller branches as well as the speckles of flowers/ leaves. I started by trying out a few thumbnail sketches to find the arrangement I liked.

I wanted the background to be as neutral as possible (unlike in "Summer rain") and painted with a lot of white mixed with prussian blue and raw umber. Then I painted in the large branches, with a myriad of colours. At this point the 3 large branches were the guding lines for the painting, and I wanted the flowers, leaves and smaller branches to remain as subtle and with as little detail as possible....only wanting to capture the random arrangement. So, I got a little more adventurous, and made a watery mix of my colors and just made "drops and streaks" of paint on the canvas for the leaves, flowers and braches.

It was an exhilarating experience and I finally feel like I have made some progress in abstract art ...at the very least I now have a different perspective of viewing nature !
I hope to continue on this journey and more experiment in abstracts ...

comic strip of my misadventures in marketing !!!

In an earlier blog ( "Marketing mayhem") about my marketing attempts for my art school, I had ended by wondering how many inquiries would really convert into a registration. Since then there have been a handful of inquiries from parents, and some of these have been hilarious !!
My first idea was to draft these experiences into a write up...but on second thoughts I decided to attempt a comic strip featuring myself !! This is my first attempt at a comic strip... !!
Enjoy !!

Attempting a frame worthy painting !

We tend to think that children normally are capable of drawing only easy, smaller, simple pictures and that we have to show them "how" before they can even start......I tried a different approach ...
I maintain a collection of photos of places / flowers / anything that could work as a reference photo for a painting, and also newspaper / magazine cuttings. I let the children pick up a photo that they would like to draw. It is entirely their own choice and I don't interfere with my 'suggestions' of what might suit them.
I only make it a point to tell them that they shouldn't expect to to complete their work in one class (1 hour), but that they should be prepared to spend as much time as it takes to make a great painting.
After that, I let them pick their choice of medium ...pastels/ watercolor/ poster colors/ acrylic/ pencil /charcoal....(very interesting to note that most children think color pencils and crayons are not worthy of being picked up ! )
That done, they start off on their project ! My input after that, is to check on them once in 15 minutes to see how they are doing, provide a tip or two, show a demo of how else they could their medium, or just wait for them to call me when they are stuck...which , by the way, does not happen too often !!

This is the result of 4 classes of work - S. picked up this photo of a beautiful evening sky. She had an experiment sheet which served as her palette to test her oil pastels. For the silhouette of the mountains, I asked her to not use black, but to try and derive black using other colors. After a focused 20 minuted effort she had made 4 varieties of black , and had also duly noted all the color and the order in which she used them to arrive at the specific shade !!! That is amazing given she is just 11 years old !

Here is another picture...D picked this one from the collection. We chose to do this in watercolor. With this painting, we had some time to reflect on physics ! Drawing reflections and ensuring that the reflection was exactly like the original...! D tried his best to get it right...especially with mixing colors..at one point he was working without even lifting his head...so focused...muttering to himself on what would give him the right colors...oh, by the way, I restricted his palette to just 3 colors....he could use only red, blue and yellow...and had to derive all the colors  required to get the painting done. Most of the 'figuring out' was done by D...my main part was to instill some patience in the child ! I pointed out the parts which he had to paint in each class...this painting was done in 3 classes. Even when the painting was almost done..D would always find some or other part that did not look just right and would start thinking about how to correct it...and would try it. It was only when he was satisfied that he stopped and then announced...."I am getting that framed! "

The art of record notebooks...

What is it with parents and record notebooks ?
Every other parent  stopping by to inquire about art classes, want to enroll their child for the sole purpose of completing record notebooks in school ...I mean...really ?
An art class to help you complete record notebooks ? Really ???

I have done my masters in Botany ...and I honestly don't understand why you need to be creative and artistic to complete a record notebook ...!!!
The record notebook is to 'record' information based on observation , in such a way that when you come back to it at a later point, you have all the relevant information in there ...
of course we don't see it that way in school ...it is something that we need to get done, because if we don't, we wont be given any marks !
So anyway ...even if you're really into record notebooks, I don't see why it needs to be a work of art !!!

So what am I upset about ??
These children in my class never cease to amaze me with their creativity ... a couple of classes of giving them freedom to draw / paint whatever they want pushes them to experiment and express as creatively  ...
See my blog post @purple

They are great at colors, even better at freehand drawing. If they are not good at record notebook drawing...to me it just feels like maybe they don't like what they're doing or don't understand why they are doing it.
Yet, their parents invariably feel that they are not 'good at drawing' because they don't do a good job in the record notebook ...like that is some benchmark !!
I find it even more hard to understand why parents are so keen to pay for an art class so their can do record notebooks better ??? You already pay a bomb in school ...and schools are supposed to get the children interested in lab work and records ... !! Parents should be telling their children the underlying purpose in 'recording' ...and also that it does not need to look beautiful ..it must capture the essence of their observation of something.
So ..there is now a collective panic in the parent community that record notebooks are something to be dreaded, and they consciously pass on their dread to the children...and everyone now successfully fears the wretched record notebooks !!
The solution is push the problem to someone else.....the art teacher , of course !!!
The best course of action for the art teacher is to find the easiest solution to this problem which is to teach children the evergreen skill of 'copy art' ! This somewhat explains why many art schools hand children a picture which they then need to copy pixel to pixel.
That is what children need to master...after all they are going to copy from some artistic child's record notebook, so let us train them to copy, and save everyone from panic...except of course the children...who are now under a pressure to correctly copy not just in record notebooks but also in art class !! Great !!
(BTW...pssst.... children work their way around this ...by outsourcing record work to the artistic record notebook drawing boy or girl in class !!)

So were'nt Da Vinci's awesome anatomical observations the foundation for his accurate life like art.
Exactly my point .....he used his real life observations to define his art.
So should'nt children use their knowledge from life, and from what they learn in school and put it to good use in the art class !!
Is that not how it should work ???

Yet, children are completely cut off from reality ...ask any child to draw a house, and he would (about 98%) draw a hut ... nearly like this ..

WHY ???
All the children who attend my classes don't live a house like that. I bet they have not actually seen a house like that anywhere ...so why are they not using their real life observation to express themselves.
Simply because that picture of a house is the stereotype that shools feed  children right from pre-KG. Why ? because the teachers in pre-kg find it hard to draw a high rise apartment !! May be. or may be they are cut off from reality too ...because they are also a victim of the stereotypical art fed to them !

Well, yes, I am all for helping everyone all around get their record notebooks in order ...but not by copying. The real solution is to get children (and parents) to observe and then use that observation effectively and creatively. Easier said than done ...but definitely worth a persistent try. 

The purple journey begins... marketing mayhem ..

It is now almost a month since a I took a break from my work at ThoughtWorks, and started purple art school.
The first 2-3 weeks were quite hectic. Mostly running around to setup the place, sign the lease, get some marketing to spread the word around ...whew !
Quite a bit of learning there ! What I have discovered so far - posters (which I intended to put up in apartment complexes around my school) - are a very costly , and ineffective means of marketing !
This, in spite of the fact that quite a few of my friends have helped me by putting up posters in their apartments without me having to run around (thank you, people !!) ! It is costly because each apartment charges at  least 500 bucks to put up posters for a week. I also found out that some apartments allow posters only of A4 size ...(in all my enthusiasm, I made A3 size posters ...awesome yes, but completely useless :) )And even when I put up posters, the response has been lukewarm. In the apartments where I directly approached the managing committee or the estate manager, the whole process reeked of inefficiency, and I could not help but think that these people were probably making money (unaccounted) from this whole poster business !!! So that shelved the poster process.
The next one was the flyer (the pamphlets sent through newspapers) - cost wise more effective than posters, and reach is good ...more households get the flyers, and no running around...I only had to call my newspaper wallah and he would come home and get the flyers, and his rates are reasonable too. Although the flyers are less costly than posters, the come with a big enough price tag too ! :) But at least they offer the flexibility of deciding the price based on the size, quality of paper, ...and also I found out that if you use more than color in the content of the flyer, then it costs more , and of course, if you print in bulk , the cost (per flyer) comes down ...!
The next thing to try was to see if supermarkets would allow posters to be put up (for a charge , of course) - and nopes, they don't !! one or two of them do allow, but they're just sloppy about it, seems like it's not worth the try. (or may be I am just too picky :p )
Ok, so in today's day and age ...should I not be using the internet to market ??? :)
Not really...at least so far I have not discovered evidence that internet marketing will be useful in my case... and here are my reasons , first, this is a local community dependent venture. The most important thing then is for people in and around the school to know that such a place exists and to know what the school has to offer. Second, most mothers of children, are not computer savvy ... (again, not that they don't know how to use the computer, but that they actually have much less access to it , since it is hogged by either the fathers or the children themselves) and it is the mothers (if not the grand parents) who usually end up having to drop/ pick up their children, and they would rather find a place that is close by, and not rely on the internet to give them that information ...(unless if they search for schools in the neighborhood, and then of course they know such a place exists, but beyond that, they would rather be informed of events / classes by other means).
So I settled on flyers . But then I need a channel to communicate ad hoc / short term events / workshops etc. To prepare flyers for each of this, needs much upfront planning, and also to commence work on that a week or so in advance. Then again for people to respond and register takes about a week or so. So a 2 weeks lead is a fair amout of time, and that means I need to plan activities that much ahead. Not that this is an issue !
Still, SMS seems to be a good alternative, more immediate. Yes, contentwise the flyers are more accomodating ...but at least with bulk SMS it seems like I can send out information of events / workshops at a much shorter notice. This is now the route I am trying to take....combine flyers with SMS + update the website :)
It will be a while before I begin to see the impact of this strategy, but for now it appears to be headed in the right direction. Fingers crossed !!
So much for spreading the word. The biggest challenge still is how many of these convert :) let's wait n watch :)