Painting the lady with a parasol

Summer time in Kanpur can be pretty devastating unless you are prepared with stuff to occupy your mind so that your body doesn't feel the scorching heat in its entirety. I am sure this wasn't the thought process then but perhaps just a lot more time available time on hands that led my younger self to sketching and painting during the summer vacations. My subject would most often be the back cover of older copies of reader's digest that I had taken from my grandmother, a regular subscriber. They often used to have reprints of famous works of art during those times. It also happened to be a time when I was greatly inspired to try oil-pastels thanks to my father's  very good friend who once made a beautiful birth-day card for me, a bunch of flowers in a vase done in oil-pastels. It was a wonderful painting, rich in colour as well as texture, it captured the essence of the flowers so well but most importantly it was made specially for me!

The choice of subjects in my case, being reprints of famous paintings, of course often had a great disconnect with the local setting. Like this oil-pastel painting I made was of a lady with a parasol!

I was curious if after all these years I could trace the original painting. Thanks to Google and my honed-over-the-years googling skills, sifting through several images of various ladies with various parasols, was I guess quite a favourite subject with painters at one point, I could find the original…..

Finding Calvin

I had forgotten how much fun reading Calvin and Hobbes can be. I mean, reading the daily comic strip in the newspaper is a bit like having ice cream drop by drop.

RRJ has pulled out a couple of collections from our dusty bookshelf and seems to be enjoying them immensely. And so am I.

The aspect I love most- the possibility of a relationship being so fulfilling......... is only in our imagination!

And I love the parents too....

To life .....

Somewhere deep down I think it has finally sunk in that the glass is rarely ever empty. There is much happening in life that can keep one engaged positively. And this positive engagement is what I believe ensures that the glass is never totally empty. In my viewfinder is the little patch of green next to one of our favourite restaurants. It was lunch time, the weather perfect, cool blue sky in the backdrop. That little water body that you see behind the trees, on its day, can stink you out of your mind but luckily  even the wind was blowing the right direction!