On watercolours
The compulsory painting classes in our school were a laughable formality. They didn’t follow a curriculum and no attempt was made to teach even the merest of basics1. Also, while you could use pretty much whatever you liked to draw and colour, there was an unwritten convention that forbade the usage of coloured pencils and crayons after grade six. The “grown ups” used poster colours, so that’s what we picked up.
I vaguely remember a period of transition between the coloured pencils and the poster colours that involved trying to use water colours. They were difficult to work with. They looked too faint on paper and the pencil markings would show underneath them. Of course, we wouldn’t dare put brush on paper directly - you’d have to draw something in pencil first and then you’d colour it - that’s just how we were taught. The dry watercolour pellets would soon accumulate a thin layer of other colours and lose their individuality. Eventually, all colours would come out as a dirty greyish-brown on paper.
The medium was thus summarily abandoned never to be picked up again until…
…we moved to the Netherlands and bought a small box of the once familiar water colour pellets at Hema out of nostalgia. They lay untouched on our bookshelf for months. I tried them a couple of times. After what must have been two decades, I experienced the thrill of applying them to paper without anything drawn on it before. But my mind was set in its old schoolboyish ways. I was trying to create a literal copy of what I saw in watercolour. I should’ve tried to capture only the essence. Like the way the world appears to me without my glasses2.
Fortunately for me, I live in an age where computers are not only small, powerful and portable, they have also made tremendous advances in image processing. I recently happened to come across Waterlogue on the iPhone App Store. It renders your pictures into beautiful watercolours. And not in a cheesy way, like the output from one of those numerous Photoshop plugins we wasted countless hours playing with in the 90s, but something more resembling a true work of art.
I’ve of course been running my pictures, both old and new, taken with DSLRs and phone cameras, through Waterlogue and have been impressed every single time. There is something about photos of cities in Europe…
…particularly Amsterdam,
that causes Waterlogue to bring out the sublime.
In the coming days, I look forward to playing more with Waterlogue. This does not mean that I am going to run every picture I’ve posted on this blog through Waterlogue and post it here again, but I might revisit a handful of them3.
I don’t know whom these watercolours should be attributed to. To the person who takes the picture or the program that transforms it to something magical.
Phone cameras, with their small lenses and tiny digital sensors, take pictures that tend to have everything in sharp focus. In the last two years of using my iPhone’s camera almost exclusively, I’ve learned to exploit this attribute and for some shots even depended on it. Still, occasionally, my heart yearns for the bokeh of large DSLR sensors and wide-open prime lenses. Waterlogue, for some reason, scratches that itch.
Another thing phone cameras do poorly is zooming. Sure, they give you “digital zoom” but the end results are a splotchy mess. But as I find myself taking shots that are essentially raw material for Waterlogue, I don’t hesitate to pinch and zoom if the composition really demands it.
Apple launches their iPhone around September/October i.e. around the onset of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Days during that time of the year begin to get short and the ambient outdoor light even at 4:00 PM isn’t ideal for phone photography. And yet the iPhone 6 camera has defied my expectations this winter. I can’t wait to see what it’ll do in the bright summer days - especially when paired with tools like Waterlogue4.
A years worth of non-existent tutelage would culminate in an annual exam that would require us to paint something depicting one of the topics given by the teachers within 2-3 hours. The topics would be on the lines of “A village fair”, “A football match” and so on. The exams were always held in early March - a pleasant time weather-wise to be outdoors in Delhi. Unlike the more serious subjects, the art exam was always conducted outdoors. Different classes would sit around in circles in the school playground trying to produce something that’d capture the topic issued by the art teacher as literally as possible. It would look more like a lunch break or school picnic than an exam. Dubious techniques were exchanged (“apply a layer of water before you start applying colours”) and paint and water were spilled. Gusts of wind would raise eddies of dust, through which unfinished paintings would occasionally fly. Kites would soar overhead in the bright Delhi sun looking for food. Even they would confuse the art exam for recess. Nobody ever flunked this exam. No child would ever be scolded for skipping it. The score from this exam never contributed to your overall grades anyway.
Obligatory link: Monet Refuses the Operation.
Certainly not these, as they already have a watercolour-like quality owing to the fog.
The wife think it’s a phase, much like my hipstmatic phase. She is
probablyalways right.
A bridge in Cologne
I don’t know what led my uncle in the US to pick a jigsaw puzzle with the Cologne Cathedral on it. I don’t know of any family ties to Cologne. Nor do I have my uncle down as a person with avid interest in German history or gothic architecture. Chances are, the puzzle was lying close to the checkout aisle or was deeply discounted or something equally mundane.
I don’t remember the exact year I received this gift in India. Given the order of certain events in the family, I would say it must be early 90s. I don’t remember the exact number of pieces the puzzle had, but thinking about it after all the years, makes the number 500 jump out at me.
At some point our family of four decided to tackle the puzzle collectively. The pieces were laid out on the trusted old coffee table and we began putting them together in right earnest. In the beginning, our progress was slow. We started at the edges and worked our way inwards. Every two pieces that would fit together would give us a tremendous sense of achievement. It took us two, perhaps three days of working on it for an hour or so to finish the project. The finished puzzle must’ve remained on the table for a week or two. After that, it was disassembled. The pieces went into the box, the box went into one of the cupboards never to be taken out again.
It was a pretty scene of Cologne Cathedral and the Rhine in summer. Cologne was a familiar name to me. In the 80s and the 90s in India (at least the 90s before cable TV, internet and mobile phones), the national channel would show a lot of German programming dubbed in English. It was almost always procured from a Cologne based company called Transtel and their logo and address would feature briefly before and after each program.
Over two decades later, a German colleague in Amsterdam would be quite surprised to learn that I knew of Dieter Hallervorden. It so happened that among other things, reruns of Nonstop Nonsens (acquired from, yup, Transtel) were a routine filler on the national channel’s evening broadcast.
There I was, on a sunny afternoon in September three years ago, standing in front of the imposing Cologne Cathedral in person. It was a pleasant, warm day - perhaps not very different from the one on which the picture on the jigsaw puzzle was taken.
I (naturally) took several pictures. Once we were back home, I let them linger on the camera’s SD Card. A few days later, while looking to free some space on it for another trip, I formatted the card and lost most of them. Fortunately, it occurred to me right about then that I hadn’t copied them over to the hard disk yet and was able to recover some of them from the SD Card.
Looking back at those pictures now, I don’t think it would’ve been a huge loss. This shot of the underside of the Hohenzollern Bridge is the only one that stands out.
Only fair, because I’ve been listening to this song by First Aid Kit that has a bit about bridges, dreams and memories:
All of my dreams They fall and form a bridge of memories where I can get back
On Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier was an ordinary person with an extraordinary obsession with photography. She worked as a nanny practically all her life and died poor and lonely. She left behind a collection of thousands of rolls of unprocessed photographs taken by her. John Maloof, a former real estate agent in Chicago, bought a box full of them at a local thrift auction while looking for historically relevant pictures for a project. Initially, he didn’t see them as relevant to his current project and the box just sat in his closet. A few days later when he started processing the negatives, he was surprised at the quality of the pictures. He shared them on a blog and soon found out that his opinion about the pictures being special was shared by many others. In fact, so good were the pictures that John tracked down several other cartons full of negatives by Vivian and has started curating them systematically. The pictures have now traveled to several exhibitions in the world and Vivian Maier has been a subject of a documentary.
I recently paid a visit to an exhibition of Vivian’s photographs at the Foam Museum in Amsterdam and was deeply moved. There is so much life, movement and a strong sense of “being in the moment” in these photographs that I found myself driven to the edge of tears.
The exhibition also left me a little conflicted. While I am glad this wonderful body of work came to light, I wonder if Vivian Maier, an introverted, private person by several accounts, would have wanted to have shared these pictures publicly. Having seen the documentary, the whole publicity seems to have been justified on the basis of a letter she wrote to a lab in France about wanting to process her pictures. A letter she never got down to posting. But I guess, the dead don’t get to make wishes. It now looks like that soon the pictures are going to be caught in a quagmire of distant heirs, greed, copyrights and lawyers.
It also got me thinking about gigabytes of pictures that lie unprocessed on my hard drive. Would I be ok with someone rifling through them after my death and making money off them? I flatter myself with the thought that someone would want to. But for a moment, assuming that such a brave soul were to come along, I don’t think the pictures will prove to have any inherent monetary value for this person to make any money off them. I would however want the pictures to be seen as broadly as their merit allows.
Photoblog: Photo #48 - Scale
If you look closely at the ship in the background, you’ll realise that there are a lot of people standing on the top deck. I think the minute size of their silhouettes does a good job of conveying a sense of scale, which was a little hard to discern from the last picture.
Photoblog: Photo #47 - The view from IJdok
When we moved to our apartment in Amsterdam three years ago, a building was coming up right in front. Rather it seemed like a building. It fact, it was an entire complex of buildings on a manmade island complete with a small harbour for boats. It feels quite surreal to now be actually visiting these buildings. Housed in one of them, is a restaurant that we like to visit. It offers a nice selection of bagels and spectacular views of the river IJ. If you are lucky, you might even catch a cruise ship going past the restaurant’s windows.
Even and odd
Urban planning in India is patchy. Nowhere is this more evident than the way houses are numbered. Whenever we’d visit friends or relatives living in a part of city we hadn’t been to before, the instructions for finding the house would have nothing to do with the house number. They’d be something on the lines of - turn left near a petrol station, take the third turn after so and so temple, walk to the fifth house on the right side of the street, yes, the one next to the one with a green façade and white gate.
Our own house in Delhi used to be on a plot of land that was once divvied up and sold to three different owners. Same house number, three different houses and owners. Confusion with mail and food delivery was common.
The real estate boom of the past two decades or so must’ve only made this worse. Where I lived in Bangalore, I saw old colonial bungalows torn down and multistoried apartments come up on the same patch of land. What they did to the numbering scheme of a street is anybody’s guess.
Naturally, the orderliness of house numbering here has taken a little getting used to. I didn’t realize it till recently that all houses on one side of a street are numbered even and the ones on the other sides odd (something the wife drew my attention to). It’s not something most people will make much of, but I am still quite fascinated by the thought and planning that must’ve gone into it.
p.s. The Dutch word for even is, well, even. The Dutch word for odd is oneven.
p.p.s. Don’t even get me started about postal codes.