Come Fly With Me

Recently I read an article (re-posted on Facebook by Kamal Dollah, thank you!) “There’s Many More Than One Kind of Realist Painting” written by Gregory Scheckler. Greg said there are many types of realist paintings. And after I painted my Purple Gloxina, Billie’s Craft Room encouraged me to break the rules and try painting in different styles.

It is not easy for me because for most of my adult life I have been following rules. It was only from my mid-30s that I started breaking them (oh man, big time. I’d tell you when I reach 70). But it is never easy to break free. And I have brought this “follow-the-rules” mindset into the process of learning how to draw and paint. I keep thinking I have to do it the “right” way.

So over the last few days I tried to break free.

Spiritual Inspiration

I decided to paint this photo of me taken by my husband while I was in a meditating pose. I like it very much because I think it is just very beautiful. I am in all white, and on my  purple yoga mat accompanied by my pot of purple gloxinia flower (purple is a spiritual  colour). It is a picture of the kind of serenity I hope to have more often.

Purple is one of my favourite colours. It is often depicted as the predominant colour of the aura of spiritually evolved beings.

Although Venerable S. Dhammika who is guiding me in meditation practise has emphatically told me that that meditation does not lead to levitation, I decided to make myself levitate anyway (sorry Venerable). My yoga mat will become a flying carpet! : )

My Darling Mimi

This is Mimi, my ginger-Persian cat who is so timid and shy that she never ventures out of the house except when I have to drag her to visit the vet. The poor darling will probably live most her days as a truly domestic cat, never knowing what the outside world is like. So I decided to take her out on a magical adventure with me.

See how sweet Mimi is when she is cradled in my arms.

Breaking The Job Down Into Parts

I also decided to turn my purple gloxinia into a thousand-petaled flower. The highest chakra at our crown is the sahasrara. It represents the highest spiritual attainment and is symbolized  by a thousand-petaled lotus.

This is the thousand petaled flower that I imagined out of my purple gloxinia – it grew to a thousand metres tall! Just like in Jack and the Beanstalk.

The sahasrara or crown chakra is located just above the head and is often referred to as the thousand-petaled lotus. It is said to be the most subtle chakra, relating to pure consciousness. When a yogi is able to raise his or her kundalini (energy of consciousness) up to this point, the state of Samādhi is experienced.

And this is my darling Mimi. As you can see I have painted her the way she is – very chubby, in a lovely ginger colour with her bushy tail (like a squirrel’s) swaying in the wind. She loves soft materials so I created a lovely pink silk cushion adorned with pink hearts tussles so she can better enjoying her ride in the air. Mimi’s favorite colour is pink – almost everything she owns is pink.

As there is no white paint in water colour, I cannot mix red and white to get pink. So I created the pink from a very watered-down red.

I make sure Mimi rides first-class.

Recently I read a book about crop circles and realised that they are seldom ever circles anymore. Look at this one.

This crop circle appeared at Stonehenge in July 2002. Beautiful.

Since I am currently fascinated with crop circles, I decided to add one in. In the form of the Sanskrit character for “om”.

Some say that “om” is the universal sound that the yogis hear in deep meditation.

I am very glad I improved on my painting of the leaf. I did a terrible job of it while painting Purple Gloxina. This time, I tried lifting the paint to create the veins. Lovely! I did the same method for my hair too.

I gave the paper a thin wash before painting the leaf green, and then lifted the paint with a smaller, dry brush. It had to be done very quickly before the paint dried.

Of course, I made sure I painted my shoulders to make them look sexy – shining and reflecting the sunlight. Like I just had a very good exfoliating body scrub done.

Putting It All Together

And this is the final painting. Me and Mimi on a magical spiritual adventure on my flying yoga mat.

Maybe I can call it a kind of magical realism? What a blast we had!

Come Fly With Me – Monica and Mimi on our magical journey.

Purple Gloxinia

A lazy Saturday afternoon at home.

Getting the purple right. Since this gloxinia flower is reddish purple, I mixed Ultramarine Blue (a blue with red undertone) and Madder Lake Deep (a red with blue tone).

Yeah!

It’s always harder then I thought it would be.

Amateurish. Next time I will try to do better.

Related articles

• Rich, Saturated colors in Watercolor (jillpaints.wordpress.com)

In Remembrance of Philip

I learnt that Philip has passed on.

I rediscovered his book of photography “Singapore by The Back Door” recently while unboxing some of my memories. It was a gift from him 20 years ago. I painted Light Through Window Shutters from one of the photos. Just two days ago someone found my blog and told me  that coincidentally, on the day that I painted that photo, he had met with  motorbike accident in Malaysia. Philip fell into a coma, woke and was his usual cheerful self, but passed away on 1 Oct. He was in his 70s.

It now seems quite strange now that the second photo I painted from his collection was Graveyard of the Flowers.

When I looked at his coffee table photobook yesterday, I realise why I like his photos. He paid attention to things that we do not normally notice, the little things. He wanted us to see things as they are, not spruced up for the camera. He liked to focus on small, telling details. Not the big picture. This is how I like to take photos too. My husband likes landscape photos. I like the small things. One little aspect of that landscape, a flower, the fence, someone’s shoe. Maybe it is because I live a small life.

I kept thinking about Philip and what a free spirit he must have been. And I would like to share his work with you.

These photos were taken a long time ago, more than 20 years ago. Many of these aspects of Singapore life captured by Philip are now just memories or have take different forms.

Related:

My Friend Philip Little by shanlung

Philip’s Final Journey by shanlung

“Siingapore by the Back Door” (Photography by Philip Little with words by Ilsa Sharp. Published 1991)

“The ‘ordinary’ kitchenwares of Singapore’s simplest restaurants and coffee-shops are speaking in their bright simplicity. Among the most familiar local wares, the enamelled tin mug and the course-pot blue rice bowl.” -Ilsa Sharp

“You do not have to look at the mark on the base to see the ‘Made In China’ sign – it’s written all over them. Common they may be, but they inspire affection and emotions associated with ‘home’.” – Ilsa Sharp

“You cant’ get cooler than this tank of fresh lime juice looks, at one of Singapore’s drink-stalls.”-Ilsa Sharp

“Almost nothing says ‘Singapore’ as clearly as the forest of bamboo washing poles sticking out of high-rise windows, festoooed with undies and shirts. This is a popular way of sunning clothes that the authorities have been unable to stop the practice, disliking its visual anarchy.”-Ilsa Sharp

“…So in a way, the brightly coloured, laminated poles stand both for the tenacity of the Singaporean traditions, and for the stubborness of the people.”-Ilsa Sharp

“It may seem an unromantic thought, but the tropical colour of Singapore is perhaps better seen in humble household artefacts made of brilliant plastics, than in the blue skies or exotic blooms.”-Ilsa Sharp

“Chinatown streetscapes are always full of surprises of the sort that Philip Little savours. Perhaps only the keenest eye would have spotted the birghtly coloured parrot high up behind the louvres. This is the kind of facade which Singapore tries to preserve, but’s the secret life behind them that the photographer tries to convey through his lens.”-Ilsa Sharp

“The old ways survive behind the shuttered windows of Chinatown, as this snatched glimpsed of men engrossed in a mahjong game shows. On still, hot nights, the clatter of mahjong tiles shatters the peace of quiet back alleys. But this was a sound far more common when Philip Little first arrived in Singapore 17 years ago, than it is today.”-Ilsa Sharp

“The elderly aunties who owned the umbrellas abandoned their tea and chit-chat and rushed outside to see what this strange man was doing, apparently photographing the prettily-tiled wall. Would he like the umbreallas moved away? No, no! So let’s put a few more umbrellas for him then…”-Ilsa Sharp

“Decay is a macabrely fascinating feature of the older parts of Singapore town….But amid decay, life with a capital ‘L’ goes on, as the open window reveals, bananas and all.” – Ilsa Sharp

“The ubiquitous condensed milk-can is of immense utilitarian value in practical Singapore: slung on a pink plastic string, it is most often used to carry coffee and tea home from the street-side stalls, a splendid example of un-selfconscious recycling. Here, it has a semi-scared function – as a joss-stick holder for incense offerings to the gods dwelling in a spirit-tree.”-Ilsa Sharp

“Easily passed by, this scene is repeated myriad of times all over Singapore. Once frozen in view, however, it seduces your eyes to linger over the colours, the sharps, the textures o daily life – in this case, even in the backyard of the gods, a temple.”-Ilsa Sharp

“The interplay of light and shadow gives this still-life of clogs on a ceramic-tiled floor its special feel. once upon a time, most Singapore resounded to the clip-clop of clogs like these, especially in the wet markets, where vendors used them to raise themselves above the messy floors.”-Ilsa Sharp

“Recycling is natural to traditional and poorer, simpler societies. The newly-born ‘Greens’ of sophisticated modern Singapore will find they have much to learn from the old pre-Green ways. Anything – a plastic bag, a soft drink bottle – is a potential carrier for a ‘pot-plant’, a special herb treasured for its flavour or medicinal properties. The Singer Oil bottle seems to add a certain something to the picture, although Philip is not quite sure what.”-Ilsa Sharp

Philip Little

Philip, his book, and the little red sailboat he called his second wife.

Graveyard of the Flowers

It has been raining the whole afternoon. Dark, wet, dreary.

I looked at this photo of frangipani flowers by Philip Little. Also dark, wet, dreary.

In Singapore, frangipani flowers are also known as graveyard flowers as they are often found in cemeteries (or what’s left of cemeteries on our tiny land scarce island).   My grandmother and mother would refer to it in the Chinese dialect of Cantonese less glamourously as as “死人花” (si ren hua) or flowers of the dead. According to Wikipedia,  Asian folk beliefs say that frangipani trees provide shelter to ghosts and demons. The scent of the flowers has been associated with a vampire in Malay folklore, the pontianak.

This photo is interesting because it shows the flowers of the dead in its watery grave. Yet, there is something ethereal about it, something beautiful transcending out of death. I had an enjoyable time painting it.

*Afternote (5 Jan 2013): I learned yesterday that Philip had met with a motorbike accident in Malaysia recently and had passed on.  He was over 70 years old, and had remained the free spirit that he always was.  RIP Philip.

 

The frangipani, also known as the plumeria. (Photo from Singapore by The Backdoor by Philip Little)

Graveyard flowers in their watery grave.

Elephant Ears In The Sun

Elephant ears or alocasia is a tropical shrub common in Asia. It belongs to the same arum family as the taro which has edible tubers.

I was not sure how to deal with the light so I decided to just do a simple painting and enjoy myself without worrying how it should look.

Elephant ears basking the in the sun.

A simple painting.

The Pink Lady And The Wardrobe Into Narnia

The Pink Lady is not an American 60s high school teen wearing a pink jacket. It is a trademark brand name for a variety of apples known as the Cripps Pink. Only the best Cripps Pink apples can be labelled Pink Lady.

The Pink Lady is my favourite apple. This small apple is crunchy, incredibly sweet, and just have that special something that make me love it so. Move aside all those Royal Galas and Red Delicious. You pale in comparison.

When I was a child, I loved apples so much that I had dreamed of owning my own apple tree one day. Which is quite an ambition since I live in the tropics and have only seen banana, coconut and papaya trees in anyone’s backyard.

And this apple talk brings me back to that same period of my life, when I was about ten, when my cousin Keith shared with me a series of books which his mom had bought from England. They were C.S. Lewis‘ The Chronicles of Narnia.  In one of the stories The Magician’s Nephew, the young child Digory Kirke brought back from Narnia a silver apple given to him by the lion king Aslan. After his mother ate the apple and became well again, Digory planted the apple core in his garden on an impluse. A tree soon grew. After many years, when Digory became an aged professor, the tree was felled by a storm and he had it made into a wardrobe. Unknown to him, the wardrobe could lead one back to the land of Narnia – and this led  to the first book of the chronicles The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. 

Even now as an adult, I think about the wardrobe sometimes.  When I want to escape to another world.

This morning was one of those times. When I bit into my Pink Lady.

I long for a day of escape, through a wardrobe made from an apple tree (a Pink Lady, nothing less) and enter a land where my backyard is an apple orchard.

But short of that, I would have to settle for one imaginary apple today.

Pink Lady drawn with Faber-Castell watercolour pencils.

Actually, I did not draw by looking at the apple but at a photo I took of the apple. After all that day dreaming of  the wardrobe and Narnia, by the time I wanted to draw it – this was all that was left.

Lotus: A Sketch

This is another attempt to start up my practise again after having stopped for months. Really feel inadequate. But we must keep going, keep drawing.

Contour drawing practise.

Shading practise.

Isn’t she a beauty? I am not doing her justice. But I will keep practising and one day soon, I will paint her a pretty picture. (Photograph by Philip Little)

Light Through Wooden Shutters

A photo from a book Philip Little gave to me a long time ago called: “Singapore By The Back Door”

I have not drawn or painted in months.

I know a drawing a day makes me an artist some day. But this has been quite difficult for the moment after having started on a new job.

Last weekend, I looked at a coffee table book given to me 20 years ago by a British photographer called Phillip Little. He was an enthusiastic man with boundless energy. When I opened his book, Singapore by The Backdoor, I was once again charmed by the photographs he took of various aspects of Singapore life that we do not normally notice. It took a foreigner to see how special some things are in our every day life.

I love this photo of a blue window shutter, with soft light and branches of bougainvillea peeping through. I wanted so much to paint it. I tried. And it was a labourous process because I lacked confidence, especially after having stopped practising for months. I was also impatient to finish. It is a terrible job I know, but it is part of my learning journey too. Who said we have to display to the world only those parts of ourselves that are perfect?

What is perfection anyway but an unattainable myth? We are and forever will be, a work in progress.

Finished but not quite finished. Imperfect in a world of imperfections. Our journey searching for and producing beauty has no end.

Related Articles:

My Friend Philip Little by shanlung

Philip’s Final Journey by shanlung

My Palette

I heard that some people keep their palettes really neat and clean while others still manage to paint beautiful pieces with the most dirty palettes. Most of us fall in between. I guess mine included.

This is my palette after one class.  I usually clean up the mixing areas but leave the paint wells intact so I can reuse the paints. I activate the paints with a spray bottle the next time I use them.

I organise my palette according to the colour wheel in a sort of circular way – putting yellows on top, blues on the right and reds at the bottom left. I further put the warm yellow on the left (towards the reds), the cool yellow on the right (towards the cooler blues). I learnt this from Watercolour for Dummies.

If anyone has a different way of organising his or her palette, please share with me.

Ixora (III)

Teacher is a drill sergeant. Here we go again with the ixora.

The third time we are painting the ixora.

The cylindrical vase was a challenge.

Ixora in pastel.

A new classmate attending lesson for the first time.

Teacher in action.