New Avatara

After(top) and Before Photos of Repurposed NYC Metro Card Art 'NYC Rabbit Hole' by Meera Rao 

When we were in NYC earlier in the month, I grabbed the expired Metro card that my husband was about to throw in the trash can. I had been thinking about the upcoming miniature show and thought it might be fun to paint on the card.  Little did I know that there is a fundraiser Single Fare 4 for New York Academy of Art once a year where the Metro card art by artists from all over world is exhibited and sold!  I may be late to the party but at least my ideas are not really far out :)  I have one more card from that trip to paint on and hoping to get more on my future trips to NYC.  I hope I will be able to participate in next year's  show ! 

NYC Rabbit Hole acrylic on NYC MetroCard 5.5x8.5cm 

Creating And Sharing

Horseshoecrab2  color pencils by Meera Rao

My work Horseshoe crab2 has been selected for the Hill Center Galleries 2015 Regional Juried Exhibition that will run from June 25 through September 29in Washington DC.  I was super excited to read in the acceptance letter that 'Juror, Mark Leithauser, Senior Curator and Chief of Design for the National Gallery of Art, selected a distinctive group of pieces from a very large field of entries -- 500 pieces from over 100 artists.'  I am grateful and looking forward to the exhibit!

Equally satisfying was the wonderful interaction I had with elementary school students in our little town at their annual Arts Festival.  I had cut up a couple of my abandoned paintings into bookmark sized strips and had the students personalize them with their art work on top or the back with color pencils as they wished.  For most of them having a background already present meant no fear of the blank paper :) - they were very happy to create on top of it. They were excited at the challenge of incorporating the colors and patterns into their own design. 

Few others decided they wanted a to decorate both the sides and made use of the learn to draw reference books! I had so much fun with them - helping them understand art is what they decide to create and is very subjective.  They also saw how to recycle art :)

The Power of Choice

Garuda Puppet  watermedia  22x30

So how long does it take me to complete a painting? - I started Garuda fifteen some years ago at the very first workshop I had signed up for.  We went to an antique shop and I sketched an Indonesian puppet in pen on a full sheet of Arches watercolor paper! Each participant then picked three colors from a basket to use as underpainting.  I ended up with Opera, Phthalo(more like acid)green and Aureolin yellow :)  Too meek to protest or cheat with tamer colors, I tried to do my best by really diluting the paints but still ended up with a very garish start. I remember very well trying to save the whites around the face of the puppet! But I never even attempted to complete the piece. Over the years, I could not discard it --the paper was too expensive, and I did not want to admit defeat! 

Yesterday I pulled out the piece. All my reference photos were lost somewhere in my studio. I decided to plunge by boldly covering the space and underpainting behind the puppet with opaque blue gouache. Things already looked better! Except for the face, the arm, and the hands, I glazed the background designs with a thin wash of ultramarine blue --that subdued the colors and pushed it back. I then defined some of the shapes with indigo violet, some with yellow ochre, remembering the  batik textile designs from the Indonesian island of Bali. Feeling a bit adventurous, I defined the eyebrow and the beak with a mix of opera and phthalo green. I finished by glazing the arm with yellow ochre and one last thin glaze of ultramarine blue on everything but the face and arms. I am pretty pleased with the rescue - mainly because I learnt so much in the process! Funny thing is that, all this took about 4 hours! And I really wish I had a 'before' photograph.

This painting session was the exact boost I needed desperately yesterday.  During the past month I had received one too many rejection notices for shows and someone from the artworld even questioned my commitment as an artist. As I thought through my experiences, I suddenly realized how far I had come in the fifteen years and how much I enjoy what I do. And talk about serendipity, I came across the wise words about 'social validation and false merit metric of prestige' at Brainpickings :What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.[…]Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like. - (Paul Graham on How to do what You Love). Tucked in the same site, TED talk by Alain de Botton about 'ideological fallacies of success.' was also just what I needed :)

So, I would like to really thank all of you who visit my blog and validate what I do here! I also  especially want to thank Aparna from Warli Soul for the 'Liebester Award' she gave me. Liebster is German for dearest, beloved or favorite. This award is bestowed on blogs with less than 200 followers but deserve more attention (-Serendipity again!) In my next post, I shall pass this along :) Meanwhile, do check out her beautiful 'Warli' art. 

Cheers to Potential and Possibilities!

Hofbrauhaus at Dusk  watermedia 12x9"

Sixty posts, twenty plus paintings, thirty some pages of color pencil 'sketches' and narrative to go with  them  for my sketchbook-fiction project  "A Day In The Life -In Blue Jeans with Gold Embroidery" and more on-the-go pencil sketches than any previous years makes me content with 2011 art-wise :)  This surely has been a year of experimenting for me with finishing an illustrated sketch/fiction book, yupo, deliberate washes and paint mixing, water brushes, field kits and working on patience! 

I am pleased to post this painting - done mostly with watercolors except the sky part where I used acrylics mixed with watercolor. The watercolor paper  was a 'test-paper' for colors by a young friend of mine who wanted to paint with me sometime ago. I pulled this paper out waiting for washes to dry on couple of Yupo paintings I was working on. I needed to keep my hands busy and away from the wet yupo. Using Masquepen Supernib I sketched free hand and then proceeded to play mostly with transparent watercolors in between the washes on Yupo. The reference was a photograph I took in Munich years ago.  The underpainting worked quite well, and I felt little stress since I was really  only 'playing' around. I am totally ignoring any problem areas in the painting and enjoying the smug feeling of rescuing a good paper :) 

 before

So, here is to a brand New Year full of potential and possibilities ! 

Magical Beauty

Rainbow Sendoff  Digital Photography

Flight delays were worth it when I looked out the window soon after settling in my seat - double rainbows actually - and I was able to capture at least one by the time I fished out my camera.  I love the   image with the blurry colors and shapes and the rain drops on the window pane. 

I have been home for a week now,  enjoying the trip all over again going through the hundreds of photographs. As I was looking at the pictures, I was reminded of artist and photographer Vik Muniz's words in a New York Times article Where Art Meets Trash and Transforms Life I had just read couple of days ago : "The real magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it." Vik Muniz's exceptional creativity, art and photography are legendary. The article talked about his newest project "Pictures of Garbage" series -monumental photographic portraits made from trash, and a documentary "Waste Land" about making of the series- -a collaboration with the garbage pickers of Jardim Gramacho, a 321 acre open-air dump outside Rio that is one of the largest landfills in Latin America. I am very touched to know that he has devoted his time and money to non-profits that provide education and job training for street children and was recently honored as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. A clip of the the documentary in the NYT website shows the scale and  the unusual and surprising materials he uses to make the portraits. It was International Artists Day on Oct 25 (Picasso's B'day), and  I celebrate it by giving a shout out to artist Vik Muniz.