An Indian Summer & Serendipity Presents....

I cannot believe I'm missing this!  An Indian Summer and Serendipity have curated an amazing event that celebrates design talent, art and culture... and all this is going to be happening in an incredible setting... a beautiful haveli in Chattarpur, New Delhi. It's going to be happening on 27th and 28th September so if you are anywhere near Delhi, it's something you absolutely don't want to miss. This one is for all you you who love all things pretty...For more details click here. 

Sadly, I'm going to be on my Sri Lankan holiday and I'm missing this :( So feeling pretty torn between excitement over our vacation (which I've been planning for the last 6 months ... hehehe) and disappointment that I'll be missing all the prettiness. 

Remember peeps... 27th & 28th September at Serendipity, Chattarpur, Delhi.

Windmills Design Festival

I had visited the Windmills Design Festival a few weeks back and just wasn't getting a chance to do a post on it... Well I know it's a bit late, but better late than never right? So finally, here's my round up of the Windmills Design Festival...

For the past few years this festival has been held at, Aya Nagar, at the studios of Windmill Interiors and Pradeep Sachdeva Design Associates (PSDA), which has become a hub for the creative community. Designers, crafts persons, artists and even an NGO often come together to collaborate and ideate at Windmills and this is exactly what the Windmills Design Festival celebrates.

[Image courtesy Devika Sachdev]

This year a number of designers and partners participated... there was some modern, almost Bauhaus inspired furniture and accessories by Windmill Design Studio, beautiful metal work by Bowman Design, colorful textile bags by Pure Ghee Designs, Pottery by Dipalee Daroz and paintings by Shefali Upadhyay, to name just a few. There is a very long list and I don't want to go on and on... I manged to pick up some really nice silk cushion covers with a lovely Nandi motif and some fun little pencils from Jan Madhyam, an NGO  based in Ayanagar village that reaches out to the disabled, especially girl-child from marginalized sections of society.  

[Image courtesy Devika Sachdev]

[Image courtesy Devika Sachdev]

[Image courtesy Devika Sachdev]

Overall it was a nice experience made even better since one of my good friends, Vishwesh, is part of the PSDA team and was kind enough to give me tour of the studios and grounds. I fell in love with the exposed brick construction, with the colorful door and window frames, the clay tiled floors and the lovely outdoor garden spaces. A great day out that made the stressful drive worth it.

[All images by Shalini Pereira unless mentioned otherwise. Please do not use these images without prior written permission]

Capturing Poetry in Motion

Its quite a task to capture the movements and gestures of a dancer, those tiny nuances of expression and enthralling leaps that make an audience gasp in wonder. My good friend Soumita Bhattacharya does just that- she captures poetry in motion. 

A freelance photographer who specializes in performing arts, she gave up her job as a biotechnology research assistant to pursue her passion professionally. Soumita has always been an avid photographer and she describes her new endeavor as an intersection of her two passions- dance and photography. She likes to work closely with dancers, so that she can understand and convey their vision through her lens.

Soumita likes to photograph dance forms from different cultures, something she says, "stems from her interest in travel, and a curious eye." She was recently shortlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Award (TFA 2013) for her project Body/CityScape, and her photographs have been published in various news dailies like The Hindu, Asian Age and The Sunday Guardian, to name a few, as well as magazines like Time Out, Caravan and First City. Soumita has also exhibited at the India Habitat Centre, The Russian Centre and the Max Mueller Bhavan.

Here are some of the fabulous images she has captured...

You can see more of Soumita's work here... 1, 2, 3

[All images courtesy Soumita Bhattacharya]

A Modern Indian Master- F.N Souza

Image via Outlook India

"I seek Beauty more than knowledge. In fact, knowledge can be ugly."
Francis Newton Souza

There are some artists whose work resonates with you. For me, F.N Souza is one of those artists. I don't claim to be an expert in art, but here's why I love his work so much.

Although there is nothing pretty about his paintings- his works are often dark, terse and thought provoking, for me, they are beautiful in their raw ugliness; there is a certain tension and energy emanating from the canvases; they seem to speak to you, almost reach out and touch you.

Souza was born in 1924 in Goa. A rebel in the true sense, he attended St. Xavier's College in Bombay, but was expelled for drawing graffiti in the bathroom; although he claimed he was only correcting the original graffiti because it was so bad. He then studied in Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai but was expelled for participating in the Quit India Movement. In 1947 he founded the Progressive Artist's Movement along with S.H. Raza, M.F Husain and K.H. Ara, among others.

"Renaissance painters painted men and women making them look like angels. I paint for angels, to show them what men and women really look like."

Francis Newton Souza

Religious imagery was a powerful source of inspiration for him especially during the initial phase of his life as an artist. In fact the underlying theme in many of Souza's works revolves around his Roman Catholic background and his antagonism towards it.

Souza painted in an unrestrained and irreverent style and his works have reflected the influence of various schools of art- Goan folk art, the religious fervor of the Renaissance style as well as Modern abstractionist and Surrealist styles, however he was never really bound by any particular style.

'Birth'

F.N Souza was the first of India's modern painters to achieve high recognition in the West. He was also a prolific writer, cementing his literary reputation with his book, Words and Lines, in the year 1959. His paintings are displayed in several international museums such as the Tate  Gallery, London and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, to name a few.  In fact, Souza is the only Indian artist to have a room dedicated to his paintings at Tate Britain. His painting, “Birth” sold for a record $2.5 million at a Christie’s auction in London on June 11, 2008.

Gond Art

Recently, I came across a book titled ‘The London Jungle Book’ and I fell in love with not only the book, but its illustrations, done by the famous Gond artist Bhajju Shyam, nephew of Jangarh Singh Shyam, whom many consider the pioneer of the art form. On trying to find out more about this art form, I came across another book titled 'The Nightlife of Trees', and was left speechless by the beauty of this art. What I love about Gond art is that I think it has a very modern, almost graphical quality that seems to capture the imagination.

The Gonds are a tribal community from Madhya Pradesh and their origins can be traced to pre-Aryan times. Their art, seen in both color as well as black and white, appears like a collage of dots and dashes from up close, but merges into vibrant images of plants and animals that tell captivating folktales of these people. Each artist has a unique signature in the form of the pattern of dots and dashes that make up their composition.

Here are some great examples of Gond art by a few of the masters.

Jangarh Singh Shyam

Bhajju Shyam

 

 The above two images from The London Jungle Book by Tara Publishers

Images by  Bhajju Shyam, Durga Bai and Ram Singh Urveti

from the book ‘The Night life of Trees’, Tara Publishers (Courtesy- Everything That’s Something-Yuti’s Blog)

  

Mayank Shyam

Neel-Kanth

Primal Spider- 3

Bana

Durga Bhai

[All images are copyright of respective artists]