Peace Tree #Calendars 2012

I have been toying with a gazillion ideas for the calendar but seeing as the time is short, I am focusing on one theme only for 2012 calendars. Around this time last year, I had written something down while painting a calendar for my room.

It went like this (I have edited it one year forward for 2012):

"The world, as we knew it ended with 2011.


This year,

There will be more trees
There will be more peace
There will be honest sweat glistening off fields and offices,
There will be unlearning of redundancy and blind dogma
And then some new learning of life and living.

The world will not end in 2012.
But it will be reborn."


I am still not sure if I will create a design that incorporates the entire text because honestly, sometimes it feels uninspiring and something that you just say without really meaning it. But while I was sketching for the first two lines, I had made, what I call "Peace Tree" that looks like this:



So while I continue to mull over the original idea (that I had named 2012- "This Year"), I am painting a Peace Tree Calendar 2012. Also, I don't like the fact that calendars have a short life and at the end of the year that they are designed for, they are discarded.

So I have plan to have a perforated break between the dates and the painting like this:



The idea is that at the end of the year, the painting bit can be separated from the rest of the calendar, framed (or not) and put up somewhere, like other posters and paintings.

Figuring things out

The past few months, while I have been happily painting away and logging in to our Facebook page to beam while I see the 'Likes' and read the comments, I have simultaneously been figuring out how I want to shape this little venture. Your business managers will be appalled by this confession- a business start-up WITHOUT ANY PRE-PLANNING?
:/

So here is what I have figured out until now. I am basing this venture on two premises:

One, buyers do not know best anymore (sorry, but there is too much one-sided media advertising and consumerist-hype that does not give us people the fair space to explore and decide what we want).

Two, it is not business, it is personal. So if I over-price my products, it reflects on the person that I am. In this case, a greedy b****. And I will not let that happen.

I also have to share why I chose the name "A Little Part of Me". The "me" in our business name is not meant to denote the artist. Instead, it is meant to convey that through this business- through posters, lamp shades, wall hangings, craft projects, stones and everything else that comes in my way- we celebrate the non-consumerist, non-market side of everybody who chooses to be part of it. It is about creating something for the love of creativity. For the love of imagination. And for the love of personal choices and likes/dislikes. So whether that part of me is a bathroom singer or that part is the inexplicable love for the Twilight series, this business will celebrate it (the latter, with gritted teeth, sure but it will celebrate it).

The 'Me' also signifies individuality and exclusivity. I strongly believe that one should not have to pay large sums of money to be able to get exclusive things.

In the last few months since we have started out, I have learnt several times that greed is a powerful tempter. When somebody comes up to me and says "hell, I would pay 100 rupees for this; you are crazy to sell it at 40 rupees", out come the greedy serpents and coil around my brain and whisper/hiss things like "why not? you could finally afford to move to a place of your own." But it is my frustration with over-priced products that made me start this venture. So I will keep prices low and celebrate non-branding like nothing else never has.

But in order to keep prices low, I will not resort to having little children work for me at dismal wages, nor will I compromise with quality of the product. This exercise is actually the most challenging of all. Can entrepreneurs choose to cut down on their own expenses, their wants and their lifestyle in a way that will empower them to survive in the limited profits that their business generates? I am working on this same principal.

So I have decided to make everything that I want. I have resorted to using public transport for long-distance commuting and for shorter-distances, using my bicycle or walking. I have given up buying goods from branded stores. For example I source my cloth from Khadi and will soon try to stitch my own kurtas and shirts. I fancied a stole that I saw in a bling-bling store recently and I am now knitting it because I'd be damned before I pay rupees 1200 for it (their MRP after generous discount!) I have given up drinking diet coke or eating at restaurants. If I want a burger, I will get my own meat, mince it and cook it myself.

There is, of course still to much consumerism in the way I live and I still a long way to go before I can shed the effects of media and advertising from my life, but this little start makes me feel incredibly empowered.

Because, and I will say this again- it is not Business, it is Personal.

Japanese art fever!

I have been gripped with an intense and possible irrevocable love for Japanese Art. I love the simplicity that at the same time is paradoxically very detailed. I like how the paintings do not focus on creating dimensional figures and forms but are still very intricate in defining and almost celebrating the forms they create- whether clouds, trees or kimonos on women. The background is the most interesting bit, usually in earthly colours and with beautiful textures.

Here are a few examples of the work I have been staring, lovingly at. I must mention here that the paintings have been taken from Google and the links provided thereunder will take you to the original website, where you may find the artist and other information.



http://media.photobucket.com/image/japanese+art+winter+/verushka666_album/Japanese%20Art/060b.jpg



http://www.erikthomsen.com/publications/latest



http://fineartamerica.com/featured/japanese-landscape-kirill-danileiko.html


https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Luneko-Koitsu-Tsuchiya-Miyajima-in-Snow/285588

I have been spending hours Googling and then staring at Japanese landscape paintings and I want to now paint landscapes of Dehradun in that form. The new year is just round the corner and I want to create four paintings of the landscape in Dehradun during these four seasons and make 2012 calendars from these paintings.

As a start, however, I am going to paint from two photographs that I took at a lovely restaurant that I visited yesterday with some friends. Up in Rajpur in Dehradun, there is a restaurant called Orchard. It is a Tibetan/Chinese restaurant and has the most beautiful outdoor dining setting with bamboo clumps and a stunning view of the surrounding mountains.

Here are the pictures:

The week where I made a lamp that got me very confused

So this week was a big, busy confusing blur of craft, paper cutting and painting!

It all started with a KFC bucket that was lying abandoned on our kitchen slab one morning. This was the day after Diwali so we had some festive lights sitting around and I decided to use those and the bucket to make a lamp. So I washed the bucket with soapy water and set down to make the lamp shade. Mistake#1: I decided against painting on the surface directly and chose, instead to glue hand-made paper over the surface after painting them in different colours. So now what has happened is that the art work on the original bucket still shines through when you switch on the lights. But that is not so bad, so I forgive myself.

Actually, I forgive myself because of the nice poetry lines that I have written on butter paper and added to the lamp shade. We have lines from Mirza Ghalib and some of the excellent poetry by Farhan Akhtar in the movie "Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara".






For the top of the lamp, I stumbled upon a beautiful poem by Harivansh Rai Bachchan and tepo-ed the two you see here:



Enough gloating. Let us move on to the other mistakes (Oh, yes PLURAL). Next, I created the base of the lamp shade. Since it wasn't really a lamp shade what with us using the Diwali lights, I figured I would do a plain sort-of base that will not take the attention away from the lamp. So I got some thick thermocole sheets, cut them into three rectangular pieces of successively smaller sizes and then painted them in successively darker shades of grey-greyer-black. What I had envisioned was this obscure space to set the lights on, and then to twirl the rest of the light. Mistake#2: I should not have quit studying science after class 8. It took me creating the whole damn platform to finally realize what most of you have probably figured: the light at the base of the platform would only darken my KFC bucket-converted into precious-lamp-shade. And as I write this, I realize this is not science but basic common-sense. (Aww, now I am even more depressed.)



So at the end of it all, I waited until darkness fell, switched off all the lights in my room and grinned maniacally as I plugged the lamp into the socket and switched it on. Remember, my slow brain has not yet figured out the base-illuminated/lamp-dark fact. So you can imagine the rude shock I got when I see this:



Anyhue, I am now waiting for the current foil-paper roll in my house to finish so that I can use it to make the stand for my lamp (you can count this as Mistake#3). Until then it shall rest on my mother's little thermos vacuum flask so she cannot carry her hot tea in it like she is used to, during winters. Eh. Until then, the lamp stands thus:




PS- I am getting a lamp holder and maybe discarding the stupid base that is the size of the base of an entire monument.

They came, they saw, they laughed!

Remember the first post I wrote about us conquering our fears? Yeah well, turns out the fear is still thriving and happily sitting in our hearts and heads!

We set up our first stall EVER at Lady Shri Ram College's NSS Diwali Mela on October 21. What a day! We started out early (by our standards) and by 9 a.m. had the stall set up and running in a beautiful little spot at LSR's back lawns. The entire time, however we were lugging this heavy brick-sized lump of fear in the pits of our stomach! And for the first hour or so, it intensified as soon as we saw somebody walking over to our stall!



But gradually, girls began to stop, read the posters and laugh and I now know there is nothing better than that. Sure, the sales do cheer one up immensely but the best part of the day was those brief moments when somebody would walk past, mind not really focussed on us or our stall, then read one of the posters and walk back a few steps to come over and read the poster properly and start guffawing! The lump of fear disappeared soon after and I was on cloud 9 right from then on. and am still floating somewhere between there and the ground!

We interacted with a lot of people and took valuable feedback and ideas from them. The idea behind this stall was to see how everybody, young and old alike respond to the posters. The stint at LSR has helped us believe that we can make something good from this.

My day was further made when I got a call from the brilliant folks at Street Smart who agreed to take some of the posters at Woodstock School's (in Mussoorie) fair. There too, the posters were reportedly hugely popular and had people laughing their heads off.

So to everybody who attended the Diwali Mela and who shared a laugh with us, a BIG thank you. My mind has been racing with new ideas and designs since that time. We we far, far away from perfect of course and with your suggestions and inputs, we will create better stuff that you will love. Creative frames will always be available now and new designs every few days (Don't count on that thought, I may not be able to stand up to the challenge)!

We are coming out with calendars soon, so please let us know what design and size would you want.

A great new painting surface: STONES!

I could have never imagined that stones would be such a brilliant surface on which to paint. While working with Street Smart (a Dehradun-based NGO that works with marginalized children through education and art), we had once set up a stall at a school-fair. I remembered the night before the fair that we had nothing to decorate our stall with, and I had then painted some stones that I picked up from the road outside my house.

It turned out incredibly beautiful but even more surprising was how the visitors at the fair wanted to buy those few stones! Some of them bought extra stuff (we had displayed paintings of children, notebooks, cards and ceramic jewellery) only so that they could get one of the painted mini-boulders!

There are so many things I love about my new canvasses. They inspire natural landscapes and it is incredible to be able to paint a tree, flower valleys or other miniature sceneries on the rough/smooth surface.



Stones look great- whether in your room or on your desk. I have decorated some of these painted stones on one corner of my room along the wall and they add an astonishing amount of much colour and life.

One of my aunts travels a lot with her family and she recently shared how they collect a stone from any beach-town they visit. Once back home, they inscribe the date of their journey and the place they picked the stone from. Wonderful idea and it inspired me to paint on a few tiny button-like stones on the theme of my hometown Dehradun. Here is one:





But know the best part about painting on stones? The next time I run out of stones, I will go visiting rover streams around Dehradun and with any luck maybe even camp out with a few friends. Spend some quiet, quality time and pick up many stones before heading back to inconvenient civilization! Now that's what a job should be like!

And since they are not, let's create 'em for ourselves!

The one where we went past the fear of failing

I have loved painting and craft work since as far back as I can remember. When I was a child, there was nothing I liked more than shutting myself in our store room and spending hours painting, scrap work, sketching, colouring and anything else I could do. To me, there is pure happiness in sitting among scattered colours, pencils and pencil shavings, little bits of white flakes strewn around when you are cutting paper and coloured water in a glass that invariably always spills. Among this chaos, I find more sense than in the organized setting of offices and workspaces in general.

As I grew older, I began to focus more on fonts. Fonts fascinate me. I love how one can express what one is saying or feeling through the shape and design of letters. I read some hilarious things and began to paint those on drawing sheets. Then I began to come with some of my own stuff and began painting those. It was all nice and good, yet there was always the pressing question- what did I want to do in life? looming behind me.

I now wonder why it took me so long to finally choose painting posters as my career? It was always right in front of me. Yet I never considered it. It finally took about 7 years of meandering through a business management program, a stint as a journalist and a few months of studying child rights that I finally accepted I am a "painter of quotes and posters".

My editor at the small newspaper that I still work for, is a brilliant man. The "original" editor he is; all complete with a white beard and a gruff ways. He said to me once that had Mark Zuckerberg been an Indian, he would have probably been working in a bank.

And that is it! We, here in our country are not taught to be entrepreneurial. We are taught to curb our imagination and never dream out of the pretty little boxes that we call security. So instead of walking straight up to what we are meant to do be doing, we often go about it the round about way. Hell, many times we don't even do that and live our lives the round about way only without really arriving anywhere.

Now to cut this musing short, I will say that though a little late, here I am with my two very close and brilliant friends, Parul and Ameen. We each give to you "A Little Part of Me". We have decided to take the plunge and to not care about success or failure, but to have the time of our lives as we attempt to take this venture forward.

We don't want to be millionaires. We don't want to have a massive bank account overnight. We just want this baby to grow, slowly and allow us creative space as well as the luxury of waking up everyday with a smile because we are doing what we love!

Since I have devoted enough space ranting about self, I shall now turn the spotlight on my partners. Parul, Ameen and I all share the TISS bond. Parul is a post-graduate in Women's Studies and will probably be the one who yanks us back to the ground! She is immensely difficult to please and so it is a blessing that she is here, because she won't let no shit pass off as a poster through "A Little Part of Me". She has beautiful ideas and has is passionate about gender issues that often find their source in a few powerful lines and visual content.

Ameen is a poet, a writer, a lover and a graduate in Social Work from TISS. He plays the डफली and writes incredibly good Urdu lines. He is an activist and that reflects in his writing, which is hard-hitting reality, unapologetically in-your-face and so powerful that it will make you stop and think. The best part about Ameen is that he constantly questions and in seeking answers to these questions, becomes a flowing river of thoughts, passion and life.

We are terribly different as far as personalities are concerned but we hope that this unbalanced, amorphous collaboration will create something meaningful and away from the contemporary one-way street that we are all stranded on.

I also mention here the role played by siblings and brothers-in-law, friends, friends of friends and some more family for putting in suggestions, creating blogs and promoting the paintings.

This blog because I (and I hope Parul and Ameen too would) want to document our journey of being entrepreneurs here- the whole truth- the brilliant inspirational moments, those rare days where everything goes right and all the erring days in between!

Let's do this!