Impressions

The impressionists were a group of French painters largely beginning to gain prominence around the late 19th century. Led by Monet who had had enough of paintings of royalty. The funny kind of self portraits, Louis XIV type. Painting, he said, should represent what the human eye sees. And he pursued, what I believe, a scientific approach (as scientific as you could get in the late 19th century). He observed that what the human eye sees when it sees a field of grass is not essentially each blade of grass and it's shade in every detail. Rather, what it sees, would be blobs of colours yellows, greens, dark greens, whites, blacks juxtaposed next to each other in a certain pattern, which when seen from a distance mixed optically to form the composite picture of the field of grass. To Monet, the quest was to represent this pattern of distinct colours without mixing them, so that once you saw the composite mixture your eyes would see as if seeing real life. And saying this, he set off in the singular most significant quest in his life. To paint in a way that would replicate what the eye sees. He sat entire days, waking up only only to stare at a building or whatever the subject was to try and understand how light and shadow lent the colours various shades. How each shade interacted with each other creating the impression the eye saw. To get underneath what the human eye saw and took for granted every living moment. And this is the way he painted!

Rock Arch West of Etretat

Guess what the real thing looks like?

Now, here are a couple of mental exercises before you click on the pictures to see the larger versions. Try and list mentally the colours you would have on the rock and the water from the picture. Then take a look at the painting (click on it to view the large version) and have a look at the colours used. Also, notice how the colours when applied on the canvas are not mixed. They don't blend into each other. No matter how unlikely the colour, they're all existing juxtaposed next to each other unmixed.

Monet was this huge guy. The kind who would walk into to a room and the centre of gravity would shift towards him. Just as he envisioned this new way of painting, so did he influence a whole lot of other guys. And so grew the impressionist movement where a lot of these painters met up at a cafe near Monet's studio in France, discussed techniques and styles and developed impressionism further.

One person of course who stood out the most, whose name is possibly synonymous with art, is Van Gogh. Van Gogh's genius lay, according to my limited explorations of this whole new hobby, in his intuitive understanding of colour relationships. His brilliance absolutely is from the way Starry Night on the Rhone

 just lights up from the inside. There's a brightness from the stars, from the lights by the river that seem to come out of the painting and fall onto you! There are other similar paintings; The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night, the very famous Starry Night. In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh mentions how it is wondrous to him that the night can be painted without any black colour. He refers to the night outside the Cafe at Place du Forum, Arles. And if you check out the painting and the others, it indeed lacks use of black almost completely. In fact I even came upon a paper that concludes that Van Gogh's style, the swirls and spirals coupled with the use of luminosity actually convey a feeling of motion to the viewer!Of course the fact that he suffered deeply in his last years and finally committed suicide may add to his legacy. But it surely can never take away from the genius he was.

What's most interesting is the sudden new perspective pursuing/developing something like this can give you. And it's amazing to realize that whatever we see everyday could have so many aspects to it. For starters, the next time you step out of your office or home and look at the sky or some trees in the sunlight try and count the number of distinct colours you see.

There's been a lot to write. Especially with so much of painting happening all around. I have kicked Van Gogh out of my display pic. to put in one of my own. But I'm in more than cursory appreciation of Monet and the entire group of impressionists. Creating something with your own hands in totality is a very rare occurrence of late. I mean yes, if you write something that's completely yours, then that's one of the things; else there's hardly anything that we do that could count as making something with your own hands. It's definitely been something that gives me reason to be pleased with self.

“Make a list. Cross it off. Build a fort. Read a magazine. Turn off the tv. Make some coffee. Smell the flowers. Take a day off. Take two days off. Take a week off. Go outside. Buy a plane ticket. Leave the country. Fall in love. Wear something new. Wear nothing. Camp a mountain. Swim with the fish. Paint a picture. Paint yourself. Listen to new music. Listen to old music. Play music. Take a walk. Make a new friend. Reconnect with old friends. Write people letters. Send the letters. Tell the truth. Grow your own fruit. Look at the stars. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Now, remember this moment.”
- Make a list. Cross it…from Goodmorning & Goodnight by Basheer


Have always crossed every list I've made. Stopped making them anymore. Never tried building a fort. Read a magazine. Tv's been turned off for years now. Can't make coffee. Haven't smelled flowers in a long time! Day offs - NA. Bought plane tickets. Flew off the mainland, though not to a different country. Fallen and bruised a couple of times. Need to buy new clothes! Check. Still needs to be done. Swam with fish in the Indian Ocean (While snorkeling in the Andamans a really curious bunch of butterfly fish would keep staring back at me after fluttering off into the distance to check if I was still there.) Have been painting non stop for the past 3 days. I'm too complicated to be done justice on canvas. Have been listening to a lot of Indie music of late, love most of it! Old music: refer to previous post. Need to find my harmonica. Missed out on football today :( , prefer that more to walks. New friends; that's not happened in a long time now. Reconnected with a few, yes. Does writing loong emails count? Try to, most of the times. Planted a mango tree 15 years ago, should have borne a lot of fruit. Stare at them very often. Check. Check.

Now I won't forget this in a long time!

You should do this exercise mentally if not blog it.

Doesn't get better than this. Pure vintage U2. This isn't just blast from the past, it's gas attack; central nervous system under threat!

Nothing better to do on a Sunday than dig up old stuff on your computer and look back at a much younger picture of you.

a) First job blues.
b) Quitting.
c) Republic day in college :-D.
d) Boredom in office can be turned into a blogpost. (copied from my office note book I diligently used during my internship)
e) Leaving home for the first time.

It's amazing how this blog captures so much of my past. I can remember the days, images briefly. Sometimes the feelings of anticipation, elation, worry attach themselves to the images too. Even the writing... I used to tinker with multiple backgrounds. Once I had this NatGeo photo of rains in the savannah; that's the one I remember most prominently. So there are posts with horrid font colours since the background wouldn't contrast with the white font colour it is now. There are posts with random capitalisations, drunken punctuation etc. etc.

It's scary to think I've considered deleting this site a few times already!

Lingshan

I struggled with this book through 4 years of college. Each year I stopped at a different page. Each year I tried again. I never went past a quarter of the book. There was no defined storyline. No characters to follow. But there were passages that flourished dazzlingly. The pictures of primitive metasequoia forests, giant panda reserves and ancient civilisations on the banks of the Yangtze shone through with a sunlit brilliance.

Eight years have passed since I had this book in my hands for the first time. And now reading it again after so many years the passages wrap around me like mist in an alpine forest. Passages I had forgotten seem to surround me and cloud any clarity I had managed to achieve. There are passages that capture the essence of some of the most intense parts of my life. Reading the book is like revisiting familiar parts of a dimly lit street where every observation is keenly etched in the poor light.

"But why have I come to this mountain? Is it to experience life in a scientific research camp such as this? What does this sort of experience mean to me? If it's just to get away from the problems I was experiencing, there are easier ways. Then maybe it's to find another sort of life. To leave far behind the unbearable perplexing world of human beings. If I'm trying to be a recluse why do I need to interact with other people? Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too much analytical thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic, so why does there have to be logic to explain what it means.? Also, what is logic? I think I need to break away from analytical thinking, this is the cause of all my anxieties."

- Gao Xingjiang, Soul Mountain

I am inspired in spurts to cover various passages from the book in multiple posts. Then gradually that inspiration ebbs and flows. Nothing is constant with me and that's given me more than my shares of problems. Maybe I will come around to it gradually.

It's evening now and dusk advances faster than my clock. I sit in an empty room, without any furniture, whitewashed walls. The single window opens to a tree whose branches silhouette against the darkening sky. I hear crows cawing as they settle in for the night. I'm all ears today. I have a lot to say but I'd rather listen to you tonight. If you were willing to speak, I'd love you to fill me on what you've been up to. Of how much you hate living here. Of how much you want to quit. Of your stupid boss and barely bearable colleagues. Of how badly you want to be home. Of...

My tales are of dark green forests and the emerald green sea. Of colours and sounds far removed from after office traffic snarls. Of another world... But my stories will wait for another day. Today, I only hope to listen.

My rickshaw came to a halt on a mound; the rain had intensified doubly and I briefly considered waiting for a bit. I'd paid a hundred rupees to get here, it would be stupid if I sat inside waiting for the rain to subside I thought to myself. I was quite wet in any case from the drift getting in through the sides of the rickshaw. I stepped out of the rickshaw. The view in front of me hit me like the final movement of the crashing drums in Carl Orff's O Fortuna.

Flat empty beach stretched for kilometers on both sides of me. A deserted lighthouse stood on my right. Skeletal remains of the compound wall barely stood upright around the place. The sky was thick and ashen. My view faded into the torrential downpour in the distance and a raging wind blasted across the utterly desolate beach. The sea churned as if a thousand rivers had emptied into it. And water fell out of the sky in extreme malice and spite.

I walked up to the edge of the water and looked around me. I was the single living being in this vast flat space in the middle of a raging storm. The wind made it difficult to stand straight and the rain stung my skin; water got into my eyes. I stood shivering violently in the cold; in awe and in fear. I looked searchingly to the ends of the beach hoping to spot someone, someone else who could see what I was seeing, someone else who would, like me, remember this day at the beach forever. There was no one of course and somehow that completed the experience. It was mine to keep, in the purest form. Unmixed by any other opinion. 

It's been over a month now since I visited Somnath and some of the Kathiawar Peninsula. And even though I don't have a camera that documented every moment of my solo trip, it'll be difficult forgetting any of it.

I distinctly remember preferring mountains to beaches when I was younger. Of course, that became invalid around 4 years back when I went to Leh. But over the last couple of years all my trips have been to beaches and I''ve enjoyed each one of them thoroughly. In 24 hours I will be at the place below and I hope it'll be the best yet!

                                                           Photo Credits: Milam Saxena