Goddess II

About a year ago I had posted a picture of a painting that I made of the Goddess Kali. She is a powerful and ferocious Goddess in Hinduism, and is worshiped as the destroyer of evil. Goddesses are usually displayed as beautiful, soft and feminine, but Kali is the embodiment of all that is powerful within us, and I like her portrayal as a warrior - one who will fight evil and destroy it.

My plan was to make a series of three Goddesses in this partial-Madhubani style. Kali was my first choice since her portrayal is so dramatic and interesting. She stands on her consort, Lord Shiva, holds in her hand the severed head of one of the villians she has killed, sits on a tigress and holds in her hands all sorts of weapons. Here's that painting again -



I recently finished the second Goddess painting, and chose Saraswati this time, the Goddess of learning. In complete contrast to Kali, Saraswati is serene and smiling, bestowing intelligence and wisdom on us. She is clad in white, and stands on a white lotus, with a peacock as her companion.

It was a lot more difficult to make this painting interesting ... I struggled with the colors, and though I initially wanted to go with a completely different color scheme, I ended up again in the realm of earth colors, which I seem to always gravitate towards ...

Here she is -


I haven't decided on the next Goddess for this series. Am currently distracted with pottery, as you saw in my previous post. So it might be another year before I produce the 3rd Goddess!

Have a great weekend.

One hundred posts and some bookmarks

It has been a year and two months since I started this blog one hot, hot summer day last year. This summer has been just as hot, and as I sit cooped up in my air-conditioned bubble, avoiding the sun at all costs like a mole in a hole, I am amazed that it has been this long.

I wasn't sure then how long this will last, but this here is my 100th post. A milestone!

To mark this occasion, here is a modest little give-away. Having been bitten by the bookmark bug (see my previous post), I have been making some more bookmarks, painting the designs on paper. Since they are a little flimsy, I thought I would get them printed on better paper, and laminated as well.

I know most of you are avid readers. So if you would like to have this set of three bookmarks, leave me a comment. I will pick three names at random about 10 days from now, and mail these out to those three of you.

Before I show you my bookmarks, here are some from my collection, along with some of my favourite books.


Can you read that? This and the next bookmark are Ilan Shamir's words. Check out more about him here. This one says:

Advice from a Bat

Trust in your Senses
Spend Time just Hanging around with Friends
Get a Grip
Enjoy the Nightlife
Sometimes you've just gotta Wing it
Guano Happens!


This one says:

Advice from a Bear

Live Large
Climb beyond your Limitations
When life gets hairy, Grin and Bear it
Eat Well
Live with the Seasons
Take a Good, Long Nap
Look after your Honey!

This third one was a present from a friend who visited South Africa and wanted to get me something small. I thought it was a very thoughtful gift. Such a simple idea, no?



Now, here are my three bookmarks. Remember - if you leave a comment, you are at risk of being picked to get these in the mail. :)



This past year of blogging has been fun. Through this medium I have found some of your incredibly creative blogs that I find so inspiring. Keep creating, and keep posting!

Howdy Du, Some Rain

(1)
Thanks to all of you who have sent rain thoughts my way. It worked!! It finally rained here after weeks and weeks of temperatures in the 100s. The rain started last evening and for a few minutes I just stood still and started at the wonder of it ...



* sheets and sheets of cooling rain drumming a steady rhythm on the roof
* steam rising from the thirsty tar road and pavement
* sun-scorched leaves of the tomato plants in our vegetable garden nodding in the rain
* fat cat staying close to my feet under the desk - he's the only one that's not happy



Here's the avocado plant with fresh raindrops. See how well it's doing!! :)



(2)
Last weekend I did my first duathlon: Howdy Du 2009. It was a 3 mile run, 17 mile bike ride and another 3 mile run. It was a hot and extremely humid day, but still a lot of fun. I finished in 2 hours and 9 minutes. The runs went well, but I really need to work on my cycling speed. In Austin everyone is into cycling - thanks to Lance Armstrong. We recently joined this group, and it's been a lot of fun so far.



The weekend's almost here ... enjoy it!

A tag and more Painted Mirrors

I've been tagged by Megha to do the Meme of Sixes. She has an imaginative and artistic blog where she posts her interesting creations, so do go over and take a look.

For this I had to post the 6th picture from my 6th folder. I have some weird and silly pictures in my set, so was a little apprehensive as to which one would pop up ... but I was so happy to find that it was this picture -



How cute is that?! This is Cheyenne, my niece's cat. We had her company for almost a month between this past Thanksgiving and Christmas, when we watched her for my niece who was out of town. It was very interesting, for we already have two cats - big boys who found petite and pretty Cheyenne to be very interesting company. It was highly entertaining to watch their love/hate relationship play out over the month. Here Cheyenne basks in the sun, lying on the bed.

I'd like to pass this tag along to 6 others who I know love to take photographs:

Blu of Blucamels in Brittany,
Vagabond of Through the Lens of a Vagabond,
Vamsee of Lets go for a vacation,
Pink Dogwood of Wandering Mind,
Jude of Cariad in Crete, and
Om of Om Chaya Chitralay.

Here are the rules:
1.pick the 6th picture from your 6th photo folder.
2.tell the story around it.
3.pass it onto 6 other people.

It's been really busy, so I haven't been able to find enough time to paint, though I've started one regular painting, and another mirror frame. Will hopefully finish them some time soon. Here are two that I finished before the last year ended ... the blue one inspired by Warli tribal art from India.




Have a wonderful weekend!

Bandelier: A Walk into the Past

I had written about Santa Fe some weeks ago in this post. It's time now to revisit New Mexico and take a stroll through time ... we will visit an abandoned pueblo (village) at Bandelier National Monument where the Anasazi, or the Ancient Ones, lived over 700 years ago.




There is a short loop trail in the park that takes us through the Frijoles canyon to the remains of the pueblos. Tall cliffs tower over the landscape, silently watching history unfold below them.

Humans arrived in Bandelier over 10,000 years ago, when nomadic hunter-gatherers followed their migrating wildlife-prey through these very canyons. Ancestral Pueblo people (the Anasazi) settled here over 700 years ago. So these cliffs have seen the drama of life and death play out countless times here, over many centuries ...




After a short walk we come to a Tyuonyi, which is a pueblo of about 400 rooms - one to three stories high - arranged in a circular pattern around a circular Kiva - a room that was used for religious purposes by the Anasazi. What remains now are just the walls of the rooms around the Kiva. When they were functional, these rooms had thatched roofs and ladders to get up to the higher levels.




Here below, is the Kiva. Imagine a thriving community here. In these rooms entire lives were lived. People got together around this Kiva to celebrate and pray, to dance and to sing. If we could put our ears to these walls, maybe we can hear the rhythms that they have absorbed over the years ...




A short distance from this pueblo are the cliffs of Frijoles Canyon. The canyon was formed by erosion when Frijoles Creek cut through the volcanic rock in these cliffs, which are full of natural cavities. The cavities were formed from air pockets in ash deposits from volcanic eruptions several thousand years ago. The Anasazi moved into these natural caves and created homes there.

There is a walkway there now, with a railing one can hold on to. As I walked along this path, I imagined young boys and girls scrambling over these rocks and through these holes, playing and sometimes falling, as their anxious mothers looked on ...




I was amazed to see this face appear on the rock wall. Tuned in as I was to the many ancient lives and stories here, I imagined the many stories that this face could tell me.




There are ladders in a couple of places, by which one can crawl into these cliff cave homes to see the world through the eyes of the ancient ones for just a few minutes ...



These walls contained life at one time. Families slept here, huddled against the elements. Within these rooms there once was laughter and grief; mischief and melancholy.




Little babies crawled on these floors, young children played hide and seek. Dreamy lovers sat here watching the sky fill up with stars ... anxious adults tended to their aging parents, and found shelter here from the rain and snow ...




Can you see the festivities down at the Kiva below, with crackling wood fire lighting up the dancers, and music reverberating off the cliff walls? What a sight that must have been!




So many untold stories buried here ... life's transience was never more apparent.

Further along there are more clusters of homes backed up against the cliff walls. These homes must have been several stories high and must have connected with the cavities in the walls as well.



Cactus fruit adds a dash of color ...



The Anasazi were artistic people, as we know from their exquisitely decorated pottery. Artists must have lived in this pueblo as well, drawing inspiration from this very landscape ... there is one well-preserved petroglyph along the trail. One can only wonder at the fingers that created this one.




As we walked back along the snow-covered trail in the warm sunshine, other natives of this land watched us go by. Their lives are woven with our own ... their ancestors provided company and nourishment to our human ancestors who lived here. This is their history as well.



By 1550 the Ancestral Pueblo people had left their homes in the Frijoles canyon, and moved to other regions. This abandoned site was designated as a National Monument on February 11, 1916.

Back home, I made a small 6"x9" painting of a familiar Native American motif to remember this visit by.




Have a wonderful weekend!

Painted Mirrors 1

Here are the results of my newest preoccupation ... painted mirrors


I have one more almost done, another one already given to a friend and yet another one half made. Three others wait for their turn while I think of ideas ...



It's rainy and pleasant in Austin. Fat cat sits at my feet, scared. It's ideal weather for some hot pakoras and ginger chai ... yum. :)

Hope your week's going well!

Remember me as loving you

When we leave some people behind in time and move ahead only with their memories, time seems to pass so much more swiftly ...

I read this piece often (don't know the author) and it's strangely comforting:

"I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other. Then someone at my side says, "There, she is gone."

"Gone where?"

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side, and she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port. Her diminished size is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, "There, she is gone!" there are other eyes watching her coming, and there are other voices ready to take up the glad shout, "Here she comes!"

And that is dying."

The painting is an old one from about 18 years ago that I painted while in college as a reproduction of a favorite poster by an unknown artist. The poster had this child's face with the words "Remember me as loving you." It seemed apt for the day.

One man's trash is another's wealth

When we first moved into our house, we found that the previous owners had left several pieces of wood of various shapes in the garage - probably left over from projects around the house.


I didn't feel like throwing them out, and decided to paint some of them to make wooden wall pieces. I found three of approximately the same size and have been working on them on and off the past few weeks. I finished the work over the weekend.


As a final step, I sprayed them with varnish finish for acrylic last night because the wood (which is a little rough) was catching too much dust that couldn't be easily wiped away. This morning I found that the varnish had dried into pale colored patches. :( The patches are especially visible on the green piece.

I thought I was finished with this project - but looks like I will have to do something to fix this mess now. The paint doesn't go on the wood as well anymore, so I'm still wondering how to fix it. Ideas are welcome!

Nostalgia for busier times?

Fall semester has started and the work load has descended with force. After a relaxed summer, I'm trying to get into a routine of teaching, grading, reading papers for my classes, homeworks and labs, and it's not easy!

I asked for this - my second round of grad school, 'coz I went back to it knowing what I'd be getting into. I think back on grad school round #1 and wonder at how much workload I handled then, without too much fuss. That's the difference between being 20-something and 35-something, I guess!

Still, fun and largely carefree though those days were, without family responsibilities and a home to care for, there were still stressful times when research wasn't going anywhere and there seemed no end in sight.


My paintings from those days reflect those dark moods.


This time around, though I have less of a workload than I did then, I certainly have too many more distractions. There are concerts, speaker events and documentary screenings to attend, friends to hang out with, blogs to read and write ;), a good camera to experiment with, etc. etc.

In some ways I miss those days though, when I was totally broke and so couldn't afford any entertainment or travel on my grad student paycheck; when all my possessions could fit in a couple boxes, my most valuable objects were those that were of value only to me; when I was single and didn't have too many friends - and so had a lot of time to wander in the woods near the university and think thoughts. Am nostalgic for those days ... :)

Madhubani in Acrylic

I love the Madhubani style of painting, and want to take a class in it one of these times I'm in India. I've been impatient to try it out though and so decided I'd go ahead and make one with acrylic. It lacks the delicate, transparent beauty of original Madhubani, but I think of mine as a variation to this style. Here's my first experiment, of Goddess Kali.