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at Musee de Cluny

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I got what I came to Paris for.

34 years ago, during a cold, bleak November, as a new art student, I had looked at The Shell by Odilon Redon at the Musee d’Orsay for the first time. I had no idea then what pastel was and I did not know that there existed a profession called Illustration. All I remember was looking at the painting of the shell with longing and telling myself that I too wanted to produce work with this level of beauty.

Today, three decades later, I stood before at this very same painting again during a brilliant, sparkling summer day in Paris and gave thanks for all sublime moments and extreme challenges that had brought me to where I am right now in my life and in my work. I realized that it is at this point that I had come to a full circle on my path. I have much gratitude for the flame of inspiration that this painting has kept alive within me all these years.

In retrospect, art does have the ability to change us, but its effects are so subliminal and over such a long period of time that it is imperceptible.

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The virtue of travelling is that it purges life before filling it up. ~ Nicolas Bouvier

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“Let go of the ways you thought life would unfold: the holding of plans or dreams or expectations – Let it all go. Save your strength to swim with the tide. The choice to fight what is here before you now will only result in struggle, fear, and desperate attempts to flee from the very energy you long for. Let go. Let it all go and flow with the grace that washes through your days whether you received it gently or with all your quills raised to defend against invaders. Take this on faith; the mind may never find the explanations that it seeks, but you will move forward nonetheless. Let go, and the wave’s crest will carry you to unknown shores, beyond your wildest dreams or destinations. Let it all go and find the place of rest and peace, and certain transformation.”

— Danna Faulds, Let it Go

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This beautiful home could be the setting in a French art film that I have walked into, with actors wearing clothes in beautiful colour combinations and speaking English in charming French accents while discussing the complexities of human relationships. But then of course this is reality and I am part of it for what in retrospect will be the blink of an eye.

J's home.

Maire d'Ivry, France

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Flowers floating on the lake

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I will plant my hands in the garden I will grow I know I know I know

~ Another Birth. Forugh Farrokhzad

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Seb

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Some sketches and drawings from my holiday at Padukere in Udupi

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I forced myself to stay, to examine these (African) masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path.

~ Pablo Picasso from Notoriously Cruel: Should We Cancel Picasso

The Guardian

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Looks good this way. Many thanks to Creative Director Sukriti, for sending these PDFs my way.

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So that's it then. The last of my four illustrations for Saba's monthly column in The Hindu Magazine.

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Regal, badass.

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Set some goals, Stay quiet about them, Smash the shit out of them, Clap for your damn self, Move on.

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On Writing - a confession

I am not writing to solicit any special sympathy. People survive much worse and never put pen to paper. I am writing to take charge of the story of my childhood; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meanings are. Spirit needs a house and lodges where it can; you don’t kill yourself, just because you need loose covers rather than frocks. There are other people who, like me, have had the roots of their personality torn up. You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectations, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact? I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being—even if the writing is aimless doodling that no one will ever read, or the diary that no one can see till I’m dead.

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“What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but to write them into being?” Instead of attempting an answer, she recounts a dream, or series of dreams, about half-finished works.

I know some of these narratives will never be finished. I dream of half-formed, fetal beings, left abandoned on a cold floor. Sometimes they are blackened, like frozen corpses. They take malign forms . . . little demons that, if they’re left, will range about the world and will bad-mouth me and misrepresent me and filch from me everything I have. But then I wake up, chilled, and put out my hands to be sure that surfaces are solid, that my own flesh is still warm. I grope for a pen and write down my dream; when the day has settled around me, the prosaic Surrey light, I take my dream to the keyboard and mince it through a second draft.

~ Hilary Mantel