Saturday, February 06, 2010

My Sister Snigdha's Painting

Virgin and Child
[Oil on Canvas}

There is a little story on how I started painting. I am the youngest of 4 daughters and younger than my third sister by 8 years (clearly an accident that my parents will never admit to :-)) . My sisters however have a gap of a year or two amidst them and so would participate in the same painting competitions in school. Every year the competitions would by dominated by the three of them, with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd prizes being shared between them, so much so that when I entered school, I was referred to as the "painting sisters' sister" :-)) Our house is filled with the prizes they have won over all the years and I always felt I could never live up to this hype in school :-) Even when I won some competitions, I secretly felt that it was only because our drawing sir, Vinay sir (who was very fond of all my sisters) was being partial to me. All of them had a wonderful portfolio of paintings done over the years. Wonderful bright colours, beautiful compositions. All done in water colours on TK Paper.

My second sister, Snigdha's paintings were selected for some international competitions that she won. I remember as a child, crawling up to the table where she used to paint and standing on a chair next to her's to watch her paint. She had a thing for female figures - beautiful eyes, hands, curves, clothes and colors. I think I modeled my own anatomy drawings on the basis of her take on people.

Over time, all of them got married and then children/ careers took over as the dominant aspect of their lives. Paintings stopped. Also, none of them went beyond water colours as a medium to paint. Now, after a gap of almost 10-15 years, my sister Snigdha has picked up the brushes again and is starting to paint with oils on canvas. Here is among the first of her paintings with the new medium. It is her favorite theme, mother and son, "Virgin and Child".

I must tell you that my parents (who had never painted ever) would buy us lots of painting books of the old masters, which we used to them try to recreate. We have all sketched our take of Da Vinci and Michalangelo since 3rd standard :)) My mona lisa sketch was done in the 4th standard vacation :-)), so our influence on early paintings have mostly been figures and people (as with the Renaissance era). We never tried anything contemporary such as cubist or modern art, which is why it is such a struggle for me to break out into anything abstract. Virgin and child is a prominent motif of that era and there are about 5-6,000 paintings done on this, at display on most major museums. My sister has a lovely son now called Hari and this is perhaps the dominant role in her life now,

You will find that her paintings have a melancoly quality to them, I used to often feel sad looking at them. I am glad to see that the expressive quality of the characters still remains and the emotions transcend the paint.

The photo does not do any justice to the paintings as she is taking them on her camera phone and I'm bluetoothing it onto the blog.

Chache, please keep painting lots and lots ..will put them all up here. Love you.

5 comments:

snigdha said...

happy childhood memories. u hv a way with words. u have made this so special.luv.

Inkk said...

@chache: yay :-))
keep painting

Inkk said...

ps: Mom saw this painting on the internet on Seema Chache's mobile and commented that "the eyes and eyebrows are really beautiful" lol

Unknown said...

Chindhu, it's such a lovely painting. keep painting... hope to see a lot of your paintings soon...

surgu, you have expressed our memories of school days so well... it reminds me of the prize distribution day. We used to wait anxiously for this day... not only for the glory of being the winners across the categories but for the really special gifts that Vinay Sir used to select for us. The gifts have always been painting materials - colors, brushes...
i recollect that we always ran short of brushes... the 0 number brush was always the topmost in our wish list.

Inkk said...

hehe yeah...i actually remembered that when i bought a 0 brush recently :)) its the best....have a whole collection of 0 and 2 brushes ;))

Faces among faces

Acrylic (with knives only) on canvas