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Bricks and design at an art school in Bangalore (Bengaluru)

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THE HUMBLE BRICK is a much used material in the construction of many kinds of building. It can be used unimaginatively, as it often is, or imaginatively to create visually intriguing textures.

 

During a visit to one of Bangalore’s art schools,  the Chitrakala Parishath,  we watched architecture students participating in an outdoor “brick techtonics” workshop. This was being supervised by the noted Indonesian architect Andy Rahman.

 

We watched small groups of students arranging bricks so as to make interesting patterns, following plans drawn up by Andy Rahman. As they worked, Mr Rahman moved from group to group, discussing with them what they were doing.

 

All around the area where the workshop was taking place, labourers were working noisily on a construction site where new buildings were being built for the art school. Thus, the architects working on realising theoretical bricklaying design ideas were surrounded by real life applications of established building practices.

 

I hope that when the budding architecture students begin designing ‘for real’ that they will recall the interesting brickwork creativity that Mr Rahman was introducing to them. For he was showing them that even the humble brick can become a component in a visually fascinating design.

Problems with identifying gender in London and Bangalore (Bengaluru)

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WHEN OUR DAUGHTER was about two years old and able to walk unassisted, she often wore overalls (jump suits), rather than girlish frocks. One day we were walking in London’s Kensington Gardens when we passed a couple of elderly ladies.  One of them looked at our child, and said to us: “What a cute little boy you have”

We replied:

“Actuually, she is our daughter.”

To which one of the ladies said to her friend: “it’s so difficult to tell one from the other these days.”

 

The former Men’s Bar at the Bangalore Club

Some months later, we were in India at the Bangalore Club (in Bangalore). In those days, the late 1990s, the club had a Men’s Bar, to which only men were admitted. Its wood panelled walls bear hunting trophies and archaic weapons.

One day, I was having a drink in that bar with my father-in-law, when our daughter arrived in the adjoining room with my wife. Excited to see us, our daughter,  dressed in her overalls, dashed into the Men’s Bar. An elderly gentleman, seeing a child in the bar, said to our daughter:

“You are too young to come in, young man. When you are 21, you will be welcome here.”

To which, my wife standing close to the entrance, said: “She’s our daughter.”

The gentleman then responded: “In that case, you will never be able to enter our bar”.

 How wrong he was.

Sometime during the early twenty-first century, the rules changed: now both men and women can use what had been the Men’s Bar.  Now, this bar has been renamed: it is simply The Bar.

Today, almost 28 years later, nobody would have any difficulty identifying our daughter as a young lady.

Getting fixed in Bangalore (Bengaluru), India

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KALIM REPAIRS JEWELLERY in Jewellers Street in the Commercial Street district of Bangalore (Bengaluru). He sits on the pavement on the shaded east side of the street in the morning and in the afternoon,  he moves to the west side to keep out of the sun. He can mend almost every kind of jewellery. When restringing necklaces, he uses both his hands and his feet, to keep the thread taut.

 

Kalim at work

Kalim is one of many people we visit in the Commercial Street area to get repairs done. These craftsmen include tailors, a bag repairer, dyers, darners, watch repairers, locksmiths, and jewellers. We have known all of them for years.

 

The great thing about these skilled workers is that they will skilfully repair almost anything. On the UK,  people like this are few and far between.

 

You can read about these wonderful people in and around Commercial Street in my book “88 DAYS IN INDIA: A JOURNEY OF MEMORY AND DISCOVERY”.

The book is available from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/88-DAYS-INDIA-JOURNEY-DISCOVERY/dp/B0FKTFBFM2/

A Hindu temple that incorporates a banyan tree

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ON THE CAMPUS of Bangalore’s Chitrakala Parishath art college, there is a small Hindu mandir, the Ganapathi Temple. Dedicated in 1984 and built by Mandelia Parmarth Rosh, it contains an effigy of Ganesh and not much else.

What makes this small religious building both fascinating and charming is that its construction incorporates branches of a large, living banyan tree. The tree is growing through part of the temple.

Man, nature, hills, and mountains in the Western Ghats of India

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WE VISITED BANGALORE’S Chitrakala Parishath, an art school, on the last day of an exhibition called “Hidden Gems of the Western Ghats”. We were alerted to it by a good friend, Ajay Ghatage, who posted something about it on Facebook.

 

The Western Ghats are a line of hills and mountains that separate the Deccan Plateau from the western coastal strip of India, the shore of the Arabian Sea. The ghats are in the most part forested.

 

The exhibition included sculptures, many of them beautiful stone carvings, paintings, and a few ‘installations’. Each work expresses its creator’s reaction to the nature and its exploitation (and/or despoliation) by mankind. And the majority of the artworks on display did this well, beautifully, and often highly imaginatively.

 

Amongst the installations, there was one by Shivanand Shyagoti that particularly attracted my attention. It consisted of a tree trunk into which hatchets had been stuck. On the wooden handles of each of these choppers, there were line drawings of the woodland creatures whose habitat would be disturbed by deforestation.

 

The other works on display were at least as imaginative as the one described above. What was impressive about the majority of the artworks was that although they often conveyed messages about the fragility of the natural environments of the Western Ghats, they did it subtly, creatively, and,  most importantly, beautifully.

A Boer officer in Bangalore 1901

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GEORGE GLAESER MUNNIK was a  Boer  during the first Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). He was captured by the British and imprisoned in the south of India. During his time in India, he was taken to Bangalore briefly and was put up in the West End Hotel.

In his autobiography,  Munnik recalled:

“We arrived in Bangalore early in the morning and went to the West End
Hotel. This hostelry stands in extensive grounds and consists of about
half-a-dozen bungalows, each a hundred yards apart and holding six
visitors; each has its own cook, butler, etc…“

The hotel still exists and is one of the finest in Bangalore. Although enlarged since Munnik stayed there, it stands in beautifully maintained grounds.

To discover why the British took this POW from his prison camp to a deluxe hotel in  Bangalore, you will need to read my book “Imprisoned in India”.  It is available as a kindle from Amazon: https://www.amazon.in/IMPRISONED-INDIA-South-African-Bangalore-ebook/dp/B07Z2S4V3P/     

OR  as  a paperback from: https://www.lulu.com/shop/adam-yamey/imprisoned-in-india/paperback/product-1y5j98em.html?q=Yamey&page=1&pageSize=4

A pianist in London’s National Gallery during wartime

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THE SAINSBURY WING of London’s National Gallery is stark, almost clinical, compared with the older nineteenth century rooms in the rest of the place. Although the pictures in the new wing can be seen without the eye being distracted by the rooms’ decorative features, I found that the paintings felt more ‘at home’ in the older, highly decorated galleries. One of these rooms, Room 36 has a central octagon topped by circular, glazed dome. In contrast to the Sainsbury Wing, this octagonal and the rooms leading of it, the Barry Rooms, are gloriously decorative in a Victorian baroque style. This and the rooms adjoining it were designed by the architect Edward Middleton Barry (1830-1880). His creations in London include The Royal Opera House and the Charing Cross Hotel.

There are several paintings by great artists such as Claude and Turner in the octagon. If you avert your eyes from these masterpieces, you might notice a small commemorative plaque that reads:

“Dame Myra Hess. On 10 th October 1939 in this room the pianist Myra Hess performed the first of many music concerts for the enjoyment of Londoners during wartime”.

Myra Hess, who was born in South Hampstead in 1890, died in London in 1965. She studied music at the Guildhall School of Music and at the Royal Academy of Music. Her concert debut was in 1907. During WW2 when most concert halls were out of action, she organised almost 2000 lunchtime concerts in the National Gallery: Monday to Friday for six years. She played in 150 of them, and never took a fee for her playing. In recognition of her work in keeping up the morale of those who heard her, King George VI made her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1941.

At the time of her death in 1965, Myra Hess was residing at 48 Wildwood Road in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Although I lived not far from her in the Suburb during my childhood, then I was unaware of both her existence and the fact that she was almost a neighbour. It was only during the twenty-first century that I spotted her creeper covered commemorative plaque on the house in Wildwood Road. Although I am glad that I did not have to live through WW2, I would have enjoyed listening to a concert in the gloriously decorative octagonal room at the National Gallery.

Comparing the art of Constable and Turner

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DURING A VISIT to London’s National Gallery, I entered a room in which paintings by JMW Turner (1775-1851) and J Constable (1776-1837) were being displayed.

By Turner in the National Gallery

Seeing these artists’ works together reminded me of a visit to the Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight (Cheshire). I wrote about this place in my book “An Alphabetical Tour of England”, and compared the two artists. Here is what I wrote in my book:

“In one small gallery, … two paintings hang close to each other but are separated by a neo-classical fireplace (an exhibit). One of them is by JMW Turner (1775-1851) and the other by his contemporary and rival J Constable (1776-1837). It is interesting to see them almost side-by-side because it allows the viewer to compare their styles and what they tried to convey in their paintings. The Turner painting depicts “The Falls of the Clyde”, and the Constable depicts “Cottage at Bergholt”. Neither of the paintings, both created in the age before photography, achieves the accuracy of, say, a photograph. Both seem impressionistic, but the effects that the artists were attempting to have on the viewer are entirely different. Turner’s paintings are often far more impressionistic than Constable’s. Although his subject matter is always at least almost discernible, I feel that Turner’s works were created to evoke both the artist’s and the viewer’s psychological and/or emotional reaction(s) to what was being depicted. In contrast, Constable’s painting techniques seem to have been designed to emphasise aspects of the scene he was painting to give the viewer the impression that he or she is looking at the very same view as that which attracted the artist. Constable regarded painting as being a branch of science. In a lecture he gave in 1836, he said:

‘Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, may not landscape painting be considered a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?’

Turner, in his almost abstract paintings such as the one at the Lady Lever, appeared to be wanting to stimulate the viewer’s deepest emotions. In contrast, Constable tried to convey to the viewer what he saw or felt was important in his subject matter. Without resorting to the almost photographic accuracy of, for example, both Canaletto and Vermeer, the two artists, whose paintings hang almost next to each other in the Lady Lever, successfully achieve their aims. For me, the avoidance of detailed accuracy of representation in both Turner’s and Constable’s paintings, enhances the impression of reality in my mind, something that photography cannot do to the same extent.

Even if you do not wish to compare Turner and Constable, I can strongly recommend a visit to the soap maker’s gallery in Port Sunlight …”

Seeing the paintings at the National Gallery reinforced my feelings as expressed above in the excerpt from my book.

If you wish to read my book, it is available from Amazon’s websites, e.g.:https://www.amazon.co.uk/ALPHABETICAL-TOUR-ENGLAND-Adam-Yamey/dp/B0FVV6JLZ7/