You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet!

For me, painting and wood working are late bloomers. I can still remember one of my first attempts at the former.

We were living in an apartment with long French windows that offered a spectacular view of the Bandra Bandstand Promenade in Mumbai. The plan was to paint the landscape framed in the window.

And so, one fine Sunday morning – (vibes of Don Martin perhaps?) – almost three decades ago, armed with painting equipment whose price tags were still proudly flapping in the breeze, I jauntily strode to the centre of our living room, set up my easel and began to paint.

Suffice to say, the only artist that comes to mind who would even remotely be able to relate to what transpired on the canvas that day is one Pablo Ruiz Picasso and even he would be rolling in his grave on reading this.

Years later, I picked up this little pocket book on painting and drawing above. I got it for a bargain price at one of the street vendors of second hand books opposite the Central Telegraph Office at Flora Fountain in Mumbai.

It contained a collection of projects on drawing and painting (obviously). Each fully illustrated with step by step instructions that even a child could follow. Add to this the readily available pots of poster colours and paintbrushes strewn across my daughter Rhea’s desk at any given point in time – (I have a lovely picture that I will post here if I can find it) – and I convinced myself that it was worth a try.

‘Spring Flowers’ (below) was one such project in that book. It was painted years ago and I still find myself gazing at it several times a day and, occasionally, even at night.

(The fact that it is mounted on the wall just above the commode in our washroom may have something to do with that.)

Spurred on by the apparent success of the spring flowers, I referred to another project in the same book to turn out a couple of charcoal sketches of my kids.

Do I expect them to win any prizes? Hell, no, but these were my kids and I had done the sketches myself using an unusual media – charcoal! Needless to say, I was thrilled.

I even did the black and white portrait below of my wife in oil paint and had the temerity to gift it to her on her 40th birthday.

We had been married for 15 years at the time. I used to gift her clothes on her previous birthdays that tended to follow a strange but relatively fixed pattern. After a perfunctory period of 4-6 months, identical pieces of the carefully selected apparel would magically appear draped on the maid. It took a decade and a half for it to dawn on me of the distinct possibility that my taste in women’s clothing left much to be desired.

The consensus of all visiting house guests on seeing the gifted painting is that it does not do my attractive wife full justice. And so it will not come as a total shock if, in the image above, you direct your appreciation towards the antique lamp from chor bazaar (the thieves market in Mumbai).

In my defence it was a unique gift, lovingly made, albeit on a budget that was well below what I would have spent on expensive clothes. The fact that two decades later, it still occupies pride of place in our living room and has not (yet) found it’s way to the ‘help’ is, in my book, a definite ‘yea’!

The boredom of the lockdown had me painting again. This time I did not need to pull out the tiny painting pocketbook as I had discovered a treasure trove of high definition videos on the Internet to guide me. I got myself a set of acrylic paints, a variety of paintbrushes and churned out a number of bird paintings. (Some of them are shown below.)

The last painting during this period was that of a Bhramini Kite enjoying a good scratch. I made it from a photograph I took during one of my trips down the backwaters of the Zuari River in Goa.

The kite, unfortunately mired in the post-pandemic grind of getting back to work, sat unfinished on the easel for almost 2 years. A month ago, with tons of time now at my disposal, I revisited the painting.

The number of colour combinations I went through painting and repainting the feathers to get the effect I was looking for would make a rainbow appear greyscale in comparison. Once done I went a step further and built a teak wood floating frame for it.

Though the mitred corners turned out quite nicely, the spacing between the frame and the painting was far from precise. Yet, I still prefer it to the cheap plastic/ fiber frames that the local frame shop was offering.

The painting below is made from an image I took of two of the three pups I found abandoned at our farmhouse in Goa a year ago. They made a pretty picture curled up on the red oxide flooring of the patio. Sadly, they are also the two that did not survive.

I must say, the positive feedback I’ve received on the painting has me tickled pink.

(Figuratively, of course. Having dealt with pigments extensively in the recent past allows me to declare with a great deal of authority that, in my case, that particular hue was way beyond the scope of being appreciable to the naked human eye.)

What the painting does not reveal are the hours upon hours spent between watching video tutorials and attempts to get it just right. Especially the eyes and the noses. I have lost count on the number of revisions. Each one more comic than the previous. Even now there are areas that I would love to work on but am too scared to touch lest I screw them up… again!

The frame was made from teak wood. Instead of using a 45 degree mitre for the joints I routed the edges of each of the four panels and butt-jointed them with pocket hole screws. Engraving them with a floral motif was achieved using my newly acquired rotary tool… which, by the way, I’m convinced is possessed. The tool tends to throw tantrums, repeatedly taking off in a temper across the teak tangentially away from the direction I want it to go.

I finished the frame with wood stain, lightly washing it with diluted reddish acrylic paint to match the red oxide in the painting.

Custom made frames for my images and paintings! Now there was a brand new horizon screaming to be explored.

Reason enough, IMO, to hop onto the Enterprise and do a Captain Kirk – boldly go where I had never gone before and use my rotary drill to try my hand at wood carving.

(The jury is still out on whether the Man of La Mancha would be a better fit to the above analogy.)

The Malabar pied hornbill in pine wood MDF above, done from an image I shot in Goa, was my first attempt.

Later, I glued 4 strips of wood left over from the frame of the pups painting to carve out one for the hornbill.

The permutations and combinations available from prepping a piece right up to finishing it are mind-boggling. The poor hornbill has been dragged through a number of iterations that involved, in a variety of combinations, carving, routing, glueing, wood filling, staining, painting, waxing and sanding. And to be perfectly honest, I fear that the poor bird has yet not seen the last of it.

I envy those talented individuals who effortlessly churn our perfect works of art at the very first attempt without so much as batting an eyelid.

Lesser mortals like me have to grind it out, using trial and error methods that usually involve more error than trial. That being said, I do believe that if one is keen on doing something then ‘passion’ and ‘determination’ more than compensate for shortcomings in natural ability.

None of the pieces I’ve made are perfect. Far from it. And yet, however flawed, each holds a very special place in my heart simply from the process involved in getting them to where they are.

Looking back, the journey towards attaining proficiency has been so enjoyable that I will not be one bit disappointed if I never get there. Or even, for that matter, come close to achieving it.

On a more somber note, a massive down-side to all my hobbies is the mess they have created at home. Fishing rods, lures, paint brushes, tubes of acrylic paint, jars of gesso, templates, framed prints, cameras, lenses, strobe lights, tripods, camera bags… the list is endless.

Added to that list now are carpentry tools…

… and sawdust!!

Yes, you read right. Piles and piles of sawdust that have wormed their way into every nook and cranny of our Mumbai apartment (and even, I’ve no doubt, our lungs).

It is no wonder then that my beloved wife had a very guarded and troubled look each time she returns home from work. I must say that over the years she had gradually become resigned to her fate and, though decidedly less vocal, her expression still says it all – “OMG, what an ungodly mess!!”

As for my part, I have neither the heart nor, if I may be so bold as to add, the balls, to vocalise a rejoinder. Instead, I have have resorted to the more cowardly approach and used it as the title for this piece.