*

Then she gave no fucks. Not even one. And she lived happily ever after.

The end.

*

Pure abstraction.

A section of Matera's breathtaking landscape captured in my sketchbook.

Landscape by itself is meaningless, but it works on our feelings in profound ways, arousing in us a sense of ourselves in relation to the outside world. What does it feel like to stare up at the night sky or to confront a mountain?

A picture which mimics the appearance of natural phenomena will miss the point, not just of their essential nature, but of ours too. Instead, some equivalent has to be found: an equivalent of the way in which they act upon our sensibilities.

~

Christopher Neve, Unquiet Landscape

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Silence is something more than just a pause, it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands.
~ Pico Ayer

Memory

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously…

—

Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
(via mythologyofblue)

An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all… feeling is the principle, the beginning and the end; craft, objective, technique - all these are in the middle.

—

Paul Cezanne

*

Maybe happiness is this: 

not feeling like you should be elsewhere 

doing something else, being someone else.

        ~ Isaac Asimov

*

What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in 

grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of

gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.

                                           ~ Chris Abani

The Toronto flatmate kept a Lily of the Valley in a bottle on the kitchen table. One of her many small gestures that made a difference. I learned that these tiny flowers also have a beautiful fragrance. 

Possibility

Here is what I know about the realm of possibility – it is always expanding, it is never what you think it is. Everything around us was once deemed impossible, from the airplane overhead to the phones in our pockets to the choirgirl putting her arm around the metalhead. As hard as it is for us to see sometimes, we all exist within the realm of possibility. Most of the limits are of our own world’s devising. And yet everyday we each do so many things that were once impossible to us.

~ Excerpt from The Realm of Possibility by David Levithan

Out in the Garden

since the thing perhaps is to eat flowers

and not to be afraid.

                           ~ e.e.cummings

Transition

Maybe the journey isn't about becoming anything. Maybe it is about unbecoming everything that isn't really you so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.

                                    ~ S.S.

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Illustration for The House of Worship

Do you think an artist has any kind of social responsibility?

No. Because an artist has more important responsibilities which have to do with the creation of works of art and works of art are not sociologically motivated nor are they even particularly useful, I mean what is the use of Alice in Wonderland? The use of it is pleasure. 

People often tell artists that you have to be responsible but that is always a way of telling them not to do what they want. The thing that people value in art is that nobody owns it. It is just the artist’s voice (or I) doing what it wants because that is how it sees things and I think you want from art a unique and particular vision of one person. And we value that because you can’t just say, ‘Oh he’s just pushing this line or she is enthralled to this or that ideology or political grouping or whatever it might be. 

The point about the artist is that nobody owns you. You just say what you have to say because that’s how you see it. And that is the value of the thing. And if people don’t like that, I’m sorry but that’s what it is. You can’t ask it to be another thing. Art is irreverent. It is not good at keeping to the rules, it doesn’t do what it is told or supposed to do. 

~ Salman Rushdie

Read entire quotation here >

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NIGHT
Lying awake at night sometimes – not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep – the quiet re-establishes itself piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments we’ve been busily dispersing all day long re-establishes itself, an inward quiet; it fills one, it grows… it becomes more perfect. It is beautiful and terrifying…

~ Aldous Huxley

How to get out of your own way by Julia Cameron

To Keep on Drawing

I simply love my Canson sketchbook. All the dry mediums - pastel, charcoal, coloured pencils work wonderfully in it and the feel of the medium on the paper makes me want to keep on drawing endlessly. Some of these pictures are taken from instagram feeds I follow where when I've liked a picture, I borrow the subject and end up making it my own by experimenting in my sketchbook. Most of these are explorations of shape and texture and colour, but hopefully in up coming blog posts, I'll have something more conceptual to show.

I've probably added this quote below in an earlier blog post, but I'd like to include it here again, more as a reminder to myself about how important it is to simply keep on drawing ~

If I had a single piece of advice to offer to any artist, it would be this: whatever your practice or medium, draw constantly. Be like the dancer, who never lets a day go past without a class. Draw as much as you can, wherever you can. Draw from observation (of course) but draw for practice too, from memory or from imagination, mark-making for precision or beauty-of-line alone, regardless of subject or likeness. Draw with pencil, with nibbed-pen, with charcoal or crayon or Conté pencil or biro. Draw with brushes and inks, or twigs dipped in watercolour or with old toothbrushes or the tips of feathers. Draw with anything. Subvert habit with new experience. Drawing can be for recording, but more than that it’s an expressive form that can be endlessly reinvented. Keep project-books and work at them even when the spirit doesn’t move you. Work in them out of discipline and respect for your art-form. They’re money in the bank for later, when you need the inspiration stored in them. Draw. Draw again. Never stop drawing.

Drawing is life.

~ Clive Hicks-Jenkins

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I just want the world to be quiet for a bit."

                                    ~ M.H

Indian Summer

Be still my beating heart, these great trees are prayers.
~ R.Tagore

In Montreal, there are always a few days during the chilly autumn season when the sun suddenly shines and everything becomes unseasonably warm. Montrealers get very excited about it. I remember their eyes shone when they divulged that this was called an 'Indian Summer'. I have to admit I was rather bewildered both by the term and the excitement, but in retrospect, I understand why. 

Here of course, the Indian summer is endless as a Montreal winter and the blooming trees are like a continuous, spectacular firework display, one after the other, splashing the skies with orange,purple, yellow, pink and now bright red. The same time the flowers bloom is when the old leaves fall and almost immediately new light green ones grow. Spring,summer and autumn are all rolled into one grand, continuous Indian summer in this part of the world.

Montrealers truly appreciate the small slice of beautiful, intense summer handed to them, and they appreciate even more, the tidbit of Indian summer rationed out during autumn.Here we Benglureans partake in a gigantic endless banquet for the senses every year. We are overindulged by nature. For me, it took just one year of denial to come back and hurl myself at this feast with renewed enthusiasm.

The Village Headman

'Tis the time's plague when madmen lead the blind.
~ Shakespeare

*

And the days that I keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, 
I have really good days.
~ RWH

*

Begin again

Uncertainty

And when you go long enough being uncertain of who you really are, what results is a form of subtle, long-term meditation — a persistent and necessary acceptance of whatever is arising, because you don’t actually know if it was the food that made you sick, and you don’t actually know if you like Eastern European cultures anymore, and you don’t really know how you feel about income inequality anymore, and you don’t know if your career path is the best for you or not, and you don’t really know if you miss your friends back home or if you just like the idea of missing your friends back home.

And at some point, you just stop asking questions. And start listening. To the waves and the wind and the calls for love in all of the beautiful languages you will never understand.

You just let it be. And keep moving.

~ Mark Manson. 5 Lessons from Travelling

*

I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.

~ J.D. Salinger

About a week back, I was trying to complete yet another drawing when I found myself getting into knots over the picture, frantically erasing and redrawing over and over. Then I paused and looked at the work and realized how mentally exhausted I was. And why wouldn’t I be?  I realized I have more or less single-handedly dismantled my life in two different cities on one side of the world and assembled it again in a completely different world on another side. I will be taking a break, a much needed one, from everything.

My website has a new wardrobe. Take a look >

Back to Work

"And lastly, when other things in life get tough, when you’re going through family troubles, when you’re heartbroken, when you’re frustrated with money problems, focus on your work. It has saved me through every single difficult thing I have ever had to do, like a scaffolding that goes far beyond any traditional notions of a career."

~ Teresita Fernandez