People sketches at Marina

After a hectic week of work, I found our CWA group was meeting at Marina beach on saturday evening. I decided to try and focus on sketching people like I did some time back at the park.  But somehow the architect in me always gets drawn to straight lines and perspectives so just to get that out of the system I did a quick one of "Endrum Vasantham Cool Bar" a shack that sold water and soft drinks on the beach.

Then I told myself firmly "only people!!"" and loosened up with this sleeping guy. After that I turned around 180 degrees exactly where I sat and before I knew it another perspective sketch. Oh no! What's wrong with me :(

An hour had gone by and I could stay at most another hour. By then I realised I was on the last 3 pages of my sketchbook so I decided to make it count.

Lot of people just come and sit on the promenade wall as its the largest free open space with great breeze.

By then we were a group of 6 or 7 sketchers so I sneaked one of Kandaswamy. That guy in the upper corner was on his phone the whole hour and probably longer after I left.

And I finally reached the last page of my sketchbook. It's a fat one that I inaugurated in June 2011. Felt great to reach the end and then flip back and look at the journey. By 7.30 I wrapped up at the beach and headed to a friend's house for dinner. Their daughter is six and a half months old and moves with blinding speed on the floor!

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.

Revisiting an old spot

Summer is back, and any outdoor sketching needs to happen early. I attempted a different view of the famous Gandhi statue this time but was interrupted at 8 am when the sprinklers came on.  I wasn't the only one. A group of men doing the sarvangasana in front of me all came toppling down too!

Steps to reach Gandhi

If you have ever fixed up to meet anyone at the Marina Beach, then the likely meeting point would have been the Gandhi statue. The Marina is actually a little over three kilometres long from the light-house at the southern end to the war-memorial at the north and the entire stretch has a wide major road of the city running down it as well as a promenade with many statues. This promenade at road level steps down to the beach which is also un-interrupted for the three kilometre stretch and is the second largest beach in the world after Rio - how about that?

So given its huge size and our immense population it is always good to plan a precise meeting point with friends so as not to miss them completely and wander around picking up long lost twins all evening. Over the decades statues of prominent figures from Indian History, our freedom movement, Tamil Literature and the Tamil movement have been placed as statues along the promenade but somehow Gandhiji is still number one.

Any marathon or walk, for a public cause, any banner holding, slogan raising get together on the beach, the morning laughing club, the VIP stand for the Republic day and Independence day parades - the starting point for all of the above is what you see above.

I actually find some of the other statues better (as statues themselves, in terms of the craft, the depiction, the idea) and hope to sketch a few more in the future here. Gandhiji is positioned at the junction of Cathedral Road and Beach Road so when I walk down from my house to the beach, then bang! - this is where I'm at.

The promenade was a simple side-walk for most of my years in Madras. Recently though, its been given a facelift. Some greenery, some meandering paths and mainly a lot of fuss around Gandhiji. These steps you see here are also pretty new, there's a huge curving oval set of steps cascading down from a wide landscaped plaza to the beach. At the point where the cascade meets the inner beach lane there's a set of funky huge granite balls (I'm sitting on one of them) serving to cordon off the pedestrian area from the parking lane.

Once again, it was quite an experience sitting in one of the most crowded points of the city and sketching and I was actually asked by a friendly north Indian if I was a foreigner!!!

Bajji on the beach

Last Sunday evening, for the first time since I started this blog, I decided to go for a walk somewhere purely in order to sketch. I packed a little jolna pai with two sketchbooks, my Koi travel watercolours and my assorted pens and pencils and set off from home. It was around five and quite cool. I kept walking down R.K. Salai and didn't spot anything particularly sketch-worthy except the grotesque-ly ugly city centre building and so I kept walking till I hit Marina Beach.

The beach was teeming with people - merry-go-rounds of different sizes, hand operated and motor operated. Push-carts with street food, kids on a roller skating rink, hawkers, beggars, in short I didn't know where to start. I was also feeling a bit self-conscious because its been a while since I've sketched on location at such a crowded place.

I spotted a really colourful merry-go-round and was contemplating squatting on the sand to draw it when I realised there was a bajji stall nearby. The stall was a simple push cart with a really lovely display of hanging molagas - so typical. Lovely huge green chillies. I immediately felt like drawing the stall too. The stall was run by a young lady and another elderly lady and they had put out multi-coloured plastic stools. I guessed you had to buy something from them to get to sit on a stool. But sitting on the stool would give me a comfy vantage view of the merry-go-round as well as the hanging molagas so of course for this reason and no other (heh heh) I ordered a piping hot plate of bajjis.

I don't like the green chilly bajji and they had a lot of other veggies on offer so I chose a mixed platter of raw banana, potato and onion bajjis.  The merry-go-round sketch got done while I waited for my order. The bajji stall sketch was done while I nibbled slowly at my delicious hot snack. It was served with a small cup of green chutney which I didn't touch since we all know what happens the day after that chutney.

Very happy with my fried snack I handed the young lady a large note and she had to send it somewhere to get me my change. At this point the elderly lady plonked herself in front of me with a large tub of onions and started peeling and slicing them. Her speed was astonishing. This is a really quick sketch because she really went through a pile of a dozen onions in less than five minutes.