Symmetry and Geometry

Akbar's Tomb in Sikandra on the outskirts of Agra is a gem. It was my clear favourite on our trip to Agra and Sikri. There is such a lot of hype over the Taj Mahal and such a mad tourist rush there. Compared to the Taj, I found Sikandra quiet and dignified as a tomb should be. The inlay work was exquisite. 

Some of the geometric patterns involving white marble inlay on red sandstone are mind-boggling. Considering I had to retry and erase several times before I got these to look the way they do in a simple line drawing, it's really stupefying to think of the work done centuries ago - the attention to detail and the sheer level of skill.

My sketch doesn't give a sense of the scale of these patterns. They are huge in comparison to the human scale and help make the towering monuments look less gigantic. It was hard enough to draw them separately that my courage ran out and I didn't try to put them on the walls of the building. 

The play of geometry is, of course, not just in these inlay friezes that adorn the main entrance gateways. They start with the arrangement of the spaces in plan, and the massing of the building. Cardinal directions and the spiritual axis give us repetetive 6 sided and 8 sided geometries in the arrangement of chambers, openings, flooring patterns and finally the surface ornamentation.  The layers of complexity are infinite and you can discover as much as you have time for. 

Buland Darwaza

This is the south facing public gate to the mosque at Fateh-pur Sikri. "Darwaza" meaning gate or doorway and "Buland" meaning high or great in Persian.  The scale of the Buland Darwaza needs to be seen to be believed. The mosque along with the palace buildings at Fatepur Sikri sit atop a ridge and the city with its people was to its south, sloping down to the plains.

While the mosque has gateways from the north, east and south, the southern gateway is the largest - the public gateway for the city. The ridge is scaled by a series of steps and standing at the base of the steps you can't see the rest of the mosque building. Towering in front of you are a pile of red sandstone steps with the Buland Darwaza and people flocking to it looking like ants.

On my recent trip to Agra and Sikri this was one of my two favourite buildings. Will tell you about the other soon. But the experience was marred a bit by the over-aggressive guides at Sikri. They started stopping us on the highway before we even entered Sikri, pretending to be officials collecting toll. And once we were stopped they tried forcing themselves on us. All the way up these steps we were hounded and harangued by scores of them who stood in front of you not letting you see what you came to see. We were probably part of the minority - independent tourists, not part of a tour group and not wanting a guide - and in India you always have to fight it out if you are part of the minority.

Discovering Vasant Vihar

Uma and I had fixed to meet up at the KFI on greenways road on saturday afternoon. She was familiar with the place having been a frequent visitor of their library. I, on the other hand, knew where it was but surprisingly had never gone in before. I arrived at three in the afternoon and walked in through a winding tree lined mud track and as I walked the traffic noises fell away with each step. Suddenly this beautiful white building came into view through the trees. It was fronted by a lush green lawn - such a rarity in my city.

On the lawn sat Uma, sketching away already. Although the building looked inviting, we had to wait half an hour for them to open after their lunch break, and the lawn was cool with plenty of shade so I sat down and spread out my things too. As it happens, we never went in. We just sat there and sketched. The sunny weather and the huge trees all around and that lawn was just a great place to be.

Vasanta Vihar, which is the name of this building, was the house in which J. Krishnamurti stayed when in Chennai. It now houses an archive and library and is open to the public. The grounds are large and have guest houses, a book shop and a lot of green space which is such a needed lung in the heart of the city. What struck me most that evening was how peaceful it was. Visitors came and went, but maintained a respectful silence, a few glanced at us sketching, but no one bothered us. The usual Indian curiosity wasn't there in the people.

The black and white sketch of the building is what I did there, and the colours and some details were added later. The sketch of Uma is a very quick one. Light was fading by then and there was a beautiful orange-ish glow on the building and lawns from the setting sun. You can check out more pictures of this here. Once again I really enjoyed sketching in company and we have lots of ideas of where to go next. 

Saturday sketchcrawl in Mylapore

No, I don't mean last saturday. This was actually 3 weeks ago and since then I've sunk into a bloggers black hole. Work and travel. But 3 saturdays ago I did something very exciting. I was approached through my blog by Uma, who is a fellow urban sketcher right here in Madras. We fixed up to meet at three in the evening and we were blessed with a cloudy day. 

Now all outdoor sketchers from other parts of the world will go huh?!! at this point but if it had been sunny we wouldn't have lasted half an hour at 3 pm. As it was, the shadows weren't crisp but we lasted 4 hours walking around Mylapore temple lugging our sketchbooks and paints around. We had fixed up to meet at the eastern entrance to the temple. The main doors were shut and would only open at 4 so we walked around the area and then realised that our first rendezvous point had a shady spot on the front steps of someone's house.

While waiting for the temple to open, the flower sellers were setting up their baskets and stalls, worshippers parked and went off to deposit their footwear in the booth and the owner of the house started washing her front steps making me jump sideways and mess up the perspective of the car.

Then the temple opened and in we went Again we made a beeline to a shady spot. The flagstones were hot even on a cloudy day and I did these two sketches from the same spot. By six thirty we were both thirsty and tired from the heat. Uma had the stamina for one more sketch sowe walked across to the other side of the enclosure and I just chatted with her while she captured the long dance hall on the southern side. Sketching with another person was so much fun and we hope to do more saturdays soon. I wish Madras had weather like Bangalore.

Fringeford memories

Today I was supposed to meet up with a fellow sketcher and spend the morning sketching outside. I hadn't blogged for the past few days with pent up excitement thinking I will have loads of fresh stuff to share by now. But waking up at five am I realised that it had rained all night and was still raining and our grand plans were all cancelled. Until next weekend then......

And so I fall back on some sketches that I made during a lovely relaxed holiday my husband and I had in northern Kerala. Wayanad is a hilly district and the place we stayed - Fringeford - was suggested by a friend. The first sketch is the narrow path through which the jeep drives in as you get your first glimpse of the house.

Now fringeford is not just a house or homestay. It was originally a cardamom and coffee estate which the present owner has allowed to grow wild. It is 520 acres of rainforest on hilly terrain with multiple streams and lots of wild animals running through it. The house is just five  bed-rooms, a kitchen and a verandah dining hall. We were very lucky to be the only guests when we were there - made us feel like the lords of the jungle... or something :)

You step out of the rooms onto a shaded courtyard with a mango tree and the ground falls away to this stream with lovely cold clear water rushing through it. If you stay for several days like we did and need to get your laundry done, they have one or two local women from the village who come by to help in the kitchen and these women take your clothes down to this stream and wash them on those stones!

There is no TV and no cell phone signal as the house is bang in the middle of all that jungle. What you can do instead is walk for miles and do a lot of animal and bird watching. The resident guide Shaji takes you on early morning and late evening treks that are customized for your trekking skill level (relatively low in my case) where you put on leech socks and scramble through jungle for a half hour or so before you come upon a breath-taking view, a gushing waterfall or a wild elephant.

The other fantastic memory from this place has got to be the food. Local, fresh, delicious and cooked in a wood fire kitchen in the old traditional way. Lots of coconut and coconut oil. The cook was an elderly man, again from a nearby village, and boy! did I eat a lot. Once done with a meal, we would totter out of the verandah into the shade of the mango tree in the courtyard and sit in a mild food coma in one of the lounging chairs. The best one was that hammock over there and the view you got was of the hill sloping up on the other side of the stream. It was thickly wooded and I tried sketching the trees the first day but was not terribly happy with that sketch so I gave it another shot on the last day again...

Kochi trip

Well, here's the coloured sketch of the flight back from Kochi as promised. The trip was courtesy the Metro Plus theare fest and we all stayed at the gateway hotel on Marine Drive. All the actors arrived a day early and on saturday evening we all assembled in Anand's room - 218 for a line reading. Only Karuna and Anish were coming in on later flights that evening and as Meena and Ravi their lines were easily skipped - so the line reading was essentially all the group scenes and songs.

The room had a cosy nook with a sofa around which the actors huddled as they ran through their lines and once again I was trying to improve my quick sketching so these sketches were done in a tiny sketchbook with a fat brush pen. Roughly five minutes a sketch.

Ultimately, though the show was a hit with the audience an uncanny number of lines were forgotten or goofed up. The gaffs were covered up with some quick thinking at times and with sheer fluke at other times making it a really hilarious show for those of us who knew what was going on.

Back from Kochi

Last weekend was spent in Kochi with Perch, where we put up Ms. Meena again. I did a bunch of sketches in a sketchbook but ever since I got back I've been so swamped with work that there's been no time to put the finishing touches to them. On my way out to Kochi I was so pumped up about sketching and determined to do a sketch in the airport even before we took off. I had loaded my hand baggage with sketching material and then I couldn't find a place to sit at our currently terrible Madras airport. On the flight I was at a window looking out at monsoon clouds.

So, feeling that lugging all those books and art material would be a waste I checked it in on the return flight. And then it turns out we're in a cute little dinky aircraft with only two seats per side and I got the aisle but had no sketchbook! Bummer! Some hotel stationery came to my rescue. The paper's really thin so I thought I'd share it with you before I try and put watercolours on it. Never know if the sketch will live thru that.

The show went really well and the Kochi audence gave us rave reviews. Will share the line reading sketches with you soon, I hope!