Queen Mary's College, Chennai - Centenary Celebrations

Yesterday I attended one of the events connected with the centenary celebrations of the Queen Mary's College, Chennai. This was the first college exclusively for women in Chennai and probably the third such college in India. It is administered by the Goverment of Tamilnadu which controls the purse strings and the faculty appointments. At present around 7500 students study here in two shifts.

The college was established in July 1914 and therefore the cebrations had started a year ago and were just culminating at the end of the centenary year. My wife studied here over forty years ago and has very fond memories of how it used to be then.

About a year ago she had arranged for the members of Chennai Weekend Artists to visit the campus on a Sunday morning and sketch on location. I spent most of that morning wandering around the campus and therefore made only a few quick sketches which I am posting here.. It was my first visit to the place and I was struck by the air of decay and neglect. Despite some efforts to spruce up the place in view of the occasion, that air still prevailed yesterday. 

In fact one of the guests at the function remarked to me about this and asked asked why on earth anyone in authority would want to deliberately run down the place, for that is what seems to be happening. To me the answer seems very simple and obvious. The people in power obviously do not care either about heritage or education. It must be a source of very great irritation to them that such a prime site facing the Marina Beach, and with a sea view from almost every part of the campus, is not exploited to its full commercial value.

Some years ago there was a proposal to shift the Government Secretariat to this location and relocate the college to a much smaller site. But there was enormous resistance to this idea, not only from the students and some of the staff, but also from the general public. Ultimately the court intervened and the government was compelled to drop the idea. One would have thought that the authorities in power would have been gracious enough to then take up the upkeep of the college in all sincerity, but that has not happened so far. Is it too much to hope that there will at last be a change of heart and that the government will do everything in its power to restore many of these buildings, use them appropriately so that the buildings are alive, and also maintain the grounds which have the potential to be a beautiful campus but  alas, at present, resemble a dump or a thorny scrubland depending on which part of the campus you are in? 

Chennai Weekend Artists

I have not posted in this blog for several months but I have been fairly regular with my Sunday morning location sketching. I am still part of the same sketching group that I joined in Sept 2012 but we now have a new name: Chennai Weekend Artists (CWA) hosted by the art community Pencil Jammers.

Chennai, which was known as Madras until 1996, celebrates its founder's day on the 22^nd of August every year. It suddenly occurred to us that by visiting different locations within the city we at CWA were actually celebrating Chennai/Madras round the year. We therefore presented our work and several of us spoke about our activities at a function held as part of the Madras Day celebration this year. The event was very well received and soon after that we found our membership surging.

Earlier we had a membership of around 30 or 40 with not more than ten members ever getting together at one time. Now our membership is in three digits and we regularly get around 30 persons participating every Sunday morning. The participants vary in age from 6 to 60+ and it is therefore now a challenge to choose locations which will meet a variety of sketching interests.

So far we have visited a number of locations within our city and our sketching itself has been confined to only a pre-lunch session every Sunday. But I think the group is now ready to spread its wings. We are considering locations outside Chennai and perhaps one day we will even think of journeying overnight to our sketching locations.

Starting from the top these are 1. A corner of the General Post Office Building on Rajaji Salai ("Salai" means "Road"). 2, Kapaleeswarar Temple, at Mylapore. 3. The State Bank of India Building on Rajaji Salai. 4. Valluvar Kottam at Nungambakkam.

Pencil Jammers at Dakshina Chitra

Dakshina Chitra is a heritage village which showcases the art, architecture, crafts, culture, and traditions of South India. It is located on the Southern edge of Chennai on the coastal road to Mamallapuram (formerly known as Mahabalipuram). Dakshina Chitra is a very interesting place, well worth visiting for anyone, and in particular for tourists if they wish to experience a bit of many parts of South India in a short span of time without actually travelling to all the places.

My wife, daughter and I are frequent visitors but most of my sketch group friends from PencilJammers were visiting Dakshina Chitra for the first time. They were bowled over by all that was there to see and sketch, and decided that this was yet another place that the group had to visit regularly. You can see a small sample of it here.

Villages in South India have a guardian deity at the entrance to the village and in Tamilnadu this deity is known as Ayyanar. Dakshina Chitra too has an Ayyanar Temple for the benefit of its visitors and this is the place that we all met at. But while we were sketching the subjects of our choice, a procession of men in huge colourful masks accompanied by trumpeters and drummers swept past us. We were all very curious and followed them and found that this was a troupe from Karnataka (a neighbouring state in South India) who were there at Dakshina Chitra to perform a traditional masked dance.

The dance was very attractive and energetic and at the end of it the dancers took off their masks and rested for a while. Some of my friends sketched the dancers in motion and a few attempted quick portraits when they took a break. I chose to do a quick pen & ink sketch of the masks which the dancers had lined up on chairs while they rested.

After that we all went back to our orginal spots to continue on the sketches that we had started earlier. I made further progress on a sketch of the Ayyanar Temple which I had started earlier and then had to leave. I completed the sketch later that day at home.

Mylapore Festival

Chennai is considered one of the cultural centres of India. And, if there is one part of Chennai that embodies these more than the others do, it is Mylapore. While Chennai is said to date back to the 17th century (1644) when The East India Company established Fort St. George, Mylapore was already a large settlement then. There are records of settlements around Mylapore predating the birth of Christ. And, before the British, Mylapore was occupied by the Portuguese and the French.

This weekend we are witnessing the 11th edition of the Mylapore Festival, when the entire community comes together to put up a four day street festival celebrating the music, art, food, traditions and culture of the place. From a fairly sedate start this festival has grown in popularity over the years.

The kolam competition is one of the very popular events during this festival. Kolam is a drawing made on a swept and washed floor using white rice powder. Traditionally it is drawn early every morning by Hindu women in front of their homes. Last year I watched as a part of a very busy street was cordoned off to hold this event. These are some of the photographs taken then.

Amongst many other things Mylapore is famous for its Kapaleeswarar Koil a Shiva temple. There are references to this temple that date back to the 7th century, but these references place the temple on the seashore over a kilometer away from the present location of the temple. Additionally the present temple reflects the architecture of the 16th century although there are inscriptions within the temple dating back to the 12th century. The explanation for this paradox seems to be that the old temple by the seashore was razed to the ground by the Portuguese to build the Santhome Cathedral and that the Kapaleeswarar Koil was then rebuilt by the kings of Vijayanagaram in the 16th century.

These are two sketches that I made on location a few weeks ago. The first is of the entrance to the temple with a mandapam (hall) in the foreground. And the other sketch is of a house just outside the temple which caught my eye because it had its own mini-temple. I later discovered that it was the house of one of the senior priests of the temple.

Grand Island Lighthouse

WetCanvas is one of several art communities that I am a member of. Currently I am active in the pen and ink forum where we have a pen & ink project every month. Val, our host, painstakingly selects some wonderful reference photographs on a variety of subjects and all of us use these to come up with our own versions which could be entirely in pen & ink, or ink washes, or even ink and other media. 

For August 2012 Harry Seiler's very nice photograph of the Grand Island Lighthouse (also known as the Grand Island East Channel Light) in Michigan, USA was one of the reference pictures. (There were ten reference photographs in all and you can see all of them here.) I did two different versions of it. My first one was a 10 minute ball point pen thumbnail while the one that I have posted here took me around two and a half hours.

 In the thumbnail I had concentrated only on the massing of the lighthouse but in this one I focussed on the lighthouse and tried to get a slightly out of focus effect for both the background and the foreground. After I had completed it I felt that I should have used thinner lines for the background but by then I was stuck with the result of my heavy handed approach. That unfortunately is the way it is with pen & ink.

Near The Mysore Palace

As we were walking from Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery towards The Mysore Palace my wife and I noticed that there were very few new buildings along the route that we took. Most of the buildings built in the style to resonate with the Mysore Palace had been retained, though they were not well preserved. One of the buildings that we walked past housed a mutt. A mutt or math is a Hindu monastic religious establishment. The sketch that you see here is of this building.

 Most of the buildings however appeared to have been let out for commercial use. Nithi made the observation that one could see a marked difference in the way buildings occupied by a single entity were much better than those rented out to multiple owners. She was right. the buildings with multiple shops were certainly run down and the common spaces and gardens around them were all shockingly unkempt. Moreover the signages were all put up any which way as each shop owner tried to outdo the others.

In contrast, the buildings occupied by larger organisations looked reasonably well cared for and the gardens surrounding them looked tended. Of course, when the time comes to get a tenant to vacate, it is perhaps easier to persuade a smaller tenant to move. But then, there would be so many of them to deal with. So I guess it cuts both ways.

One of the buildings that we passed by was occupied by a national telecom comany. I found the building attractive and this is a sketch of the cupolas over it.

Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery, Mysore

Recently my wife Nithi and I went on a brief sketching holiday to Mysore, one of the cleanest cities in India. The weather was extremely kind and it was very pleasant to be outside. We had made up our mind not to do the normal tourist circuit and instead confine ourselves to walking around the shady streets, taking in the streetscape, and streetside activities.

Jaganmohan Palace

 However, we were tempted to travel a bit from where we were staying to visit the Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery since we had heard that this gallery had a collection of prized paintings and artefacts that was worth seeing. The art gallery is located in the Jaganmohan Palace which was built in 1861 when the original Mysore Palace was gutted in a fire.The royal Wodeyar family used the Jaganmohan Palace as their home from 1861 to 1912 when the construction of the present Mysore Palace was completed.

 

Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery

 

A visit to the Sri Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery is a must for anyone who wishes to learn how not to run a gallery. First of all, the building does not lend itself easily to this usage. The display is spread over three levels (floors) and even on each floor there are level variations where vistors have to negotiate several steps. And, there are no elevators or ramps to negotiate any of these level differences.

The paintings and artefacts are not displayed to advantage. They are badly positioned with no consideration given to the appropriate distance from which paintings of different sizes should be viewed, and the heights at which they should be hung to be viewer friendly. The lighting is absolutely terrible and is in fact by itself a great source of irritation and an impediment to the viewing of the paintings.

Worst of all is the condition of the paintings themselves. Many of the paintings appear to be torn and damaged. Some restoration work appears to have been attempted on a few of the paintings, but this has been done very incompetently. Mysore is a place which receives a lot of rainfall and yet there is no protection for the paintings and art objects in this gallery from dust and humidity.

That morning we had set out from our hotel very eagerly expecting a treat and instead we came away from the gallery feeling very depressed and angry with the gross neglect and inefficency of whoever was in charge of this place.

Hotel du Parc, Puducherry (formerly known as Pondicherry)

I enjoy sketching and painting. Generally I use reference pictures and I am quite willing to spend a lot of time over each drawing. But over the last few years I have begun to enjoy sketching on location. However this calls for a different approach. Speed is important, and capturing the essential forms, proportions, perspective, and mood are more important than details.

Although I would love to sketch on location more often, so far I have been able to do this only when I am on a holiday. One such occasion was on a family holiday to Puducherry last year. Puducherry means "new settlement" and this is how this settlement was known before the French occupied it for over two and a half centuries. During this period it was called Pondicherry and much of the French influence is strongly present in Puducherry even now.

On our holiday we stayed at Hotel du Parc. This is a small heritage hotel which is very conveniently located in the French Quarter of the town close to the beach, the park, the ashram, and the museum. It is housed in a restored portion of Villa Aroume which was built in early 17th century and served as the residence of several French Governors including Dupleix.

My first sketch was done sitting at the doorstep of our room looking across the courtyard at the entrance to the room occupied by the other members of our holiday group. I was able to sit in the shade (which is an important consideration in India). And, since this was within the hotel and not in anyone's way, I was left undisturbed for the entire duration of my sketching.

For the second sketch I sat in the courtyard looking out towards the entrance gate. This time I was a bit more exposed, in every sense. I was in the direct path of a lot of the hotel residents and staff, and several of them stopped to look over my shoulder and chat with me. One of them even offered to stand over me with an umbrella and provide me shade.

While I was busy sketching a young man walked up and very apologetically introduced himself as the architect who had helped convert the old building into a hotel. He happened to be visiting the place.

The Paris Observatory, Meudon, France

My sketch shows the Paris Observatory, located at Meudon on the outskirts of Paris. This is the last sketch in my Tour de France 2010 series. LIke each of the previous 20 sketches in this series, this one too is 12 cm x 9.5 cm (approx. 4.75" x 3.75").

The observatory was built in the 17th century under King Louis XIV, and was extended several times in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. The most recent additions were made in 1951.
The world's first national almanac was published by the Paris Observatory in the 17th century, and in the mid-19th century the observatory published the first weather maps. In 1913 the Paris Observatory collaborated with the US Naval Observatory to establish the exact longitudinal difference between the two observatories. This was done by exchanging radio signals, with the Paris Observatory using the Eiffel Tower as an antenna.

The 2010 Tour de France concluded on 25th July 2010, 23 days after the cyclists started from Rotterdam. In all there were 21 days of racing and 2 rest days. Since 1975 the race has finished in Paris at the Champs Elysees. The route into Paris varies every year, but it now concludes with 8 laps of the Champs Elysees. In the past this used to be 10 laps. 

Traditionally the winner of the overall classification (yellow jersey) is settled before this last stage. The wearer of the yellow jersey at the start of the final stage therefore has the luxury of savouring the ride into Paris and has only to ensure that he does not meet with any mishap on the way. But there have been a couple of exceptions to this.

In 1979 Joop Zoetemelk attacked Bernard Hinault on the last stage, hoping to win enough time to claim the victory. But Hinault chased Zoetemelk down, and beat him for the stage victory and the overall prize.

In 1989 Laurent Fignon led Greg LeMond by 50 seconds coming into the final stage of the Tour. But that stage was a time trial and therefore, without violating any tradition, LeMond was able to overcome the deficit and win by 8 seconds. (Just imagine...at the end of around 3300 kms of racing only 8 seconds separated the first two riders that year!!!)

This tradition of not attacking the wearer of the yellow jersey does not extend to the other classifications and on several occasions these have been settled on the last day in thrilling fashion.

The final stage starts with the race leader's team serving champagne, and there is a lot of joking and relaxed riding. But as the riders approach Paris the pace quickens, and around Champs Elysees the racing is really very intense for the stage victory and to settle the various classifications other than the yellow jersey.

The final stage of the 2010 Tour de France was won by Mark Cavendish, who became the first winner of consecutive Champs-Élysées stages. The Isle of Man sprinter won five stages in the 2010 Tour, more than any other rider, taking his career tally to 15 stage wins. and this year (i.e. in the 2011 Tour) he once again won 5 stages including the final (Champs Elysees) stage. He certainly deserves his nickname "the Manx Missile".

For Contador this was his third Tour de France victory, and the second time in a row that Andy Schleck had to finish a step lower than Contador on the winners' podium. Alessandro Petacchi won the sprinters classification (green jersey), Anthony Charteau won the king of the mountains classification (polka dot jersey), Andy Schleck won the best young rider classification (white jersey), and  Team RadioShack won the team competition.

To all of you who have been with me on my virtual journey...... thank you for your patience and encouragement.

Old Harbour Hotel, Fort Kochi

From the Kumarakom area my wife and I drove down to Fort Kochi for the next leg of our holiday. I enjoy travelling through Kerala. The landscape is always lush and green, and there is so much to see regardless of which part of Kerala one is in. But this time the drive was not as pleasant as I had hoped it would be. Some major pipe laying project was in progress and the road was in very poor shape for most of the distance.

When I was a teenager, and even into my mid-twenties, I used to visit Fort Kochi at least once or twice a year. Since I used to live only a few miles away across the backwaters, these were day trips. I recall that there were very few hotels in the area and it was difficult in those days to get food to my taste over there. That was not the case a few miles away at Ernakulam. This was about 35 years ago. Since then Fort Kochi has transformed itself into a tourist destination with plenty of hotels and cafes.

We stayed at The Old Harbour Hotel, a small but exquisitely furnished hotel, very close to the waterfront. This building was originally built by the Dutch and used as a warehouse. Later it passed into the hands of the British and was used as a tea auction house and also as a residence. Recently it was bought by an Indian and converted into the present hotel with the help of a Dutch architect. My friend, Mohan Pulimood was involved in the project, and it was he who recommended the hotel to me. I am glad I took his advice.

Coconut Lagoon, the eco-resort

After a blissful 24 hour stay aboard a houseboat we were dropped off at Coconut Lagoon, a beautiful eco-resort near Kumarakom. This resort is just a few miles outside Kottayam, but can be reached only by boat. Normally the guests are picked up from one of two jetties (piers) and brought by boat right up to the hotel's reception block. But, since our houseboat was too large for the channel leading into the hotel we had to alight a short distance away.

We were received with sandal paste and flowers by a young & pretty lady dressed in traditional Kerala style. She was accompanied by a musician playing a welcome tune on a flute. We discovered later that the musician, when not engaged in receiving guests, was on hand to give the guests free lessons on how to play some of the instruments.

The buildings in Coconut Lagoon are all over a century old, and some even date back to the 18th century. They have all been dismantled from their original locations from all over Kerala and painstakingly reassembled at this resort.

The reception block for example, is a "nalukettu" design with a central four-cornered open courtyard. It was originally built in 1860 and located at a place called Vaikom. It was purchased by Coconut Lagoon in 1993 and was re-assembled at its current location with the help of a master craftsman.

The dining block is a larger and more imposing structure. It is an "ettukattu" design, and has two courtyards. This is the oldest building on the site.

Most of the buildings at Coconut Lagoon are representative of several types of traditional Kerala architecture and have all been reassembled conforming to the "thachu shastra" style of carpentry. All these buildings are very tastefully located amidst coconut groves and a network of irrigation canals.