Noah & The Ship of Fools

Media: Crayon, ink, collage with found images
© Amruta Patil 2010

The Ark is hijacked by fools with skull-and-bones ambitions. Noah is thrown overboard with his wife. His curse makes the mutinous crew blind. A new flag is raised. With toothy T Rex at its helm, the refurbished Ark (now a pirate ship) sails a predictable course.

24 hours, 24 pages; with no opportunity to rework, or use text. (The latter being the source of some awkwardness). Surprise clause was to necessarily include pirates in the tale. Visit the link to see the images: http://www.24hdelabandedessinee.com/public/auteurs2010.php?id=9820

Cent pour Cent (100 for 100)

100 comic book authors from around the world, 100 original artworks in unique coupling - one author's work being an ode to a beloved other. Image above is from the press release. On view 28th Jan - 28th March 2010 at the Museum of Comics, Angouleme, France. For more information: http://www.citebd.org/spip.php?article568

Closing the loop

Concluding episode of Babel Fish, First City Magazine © Amruta Patil 2010

On leaving the quiet place

The retreat, as it were. It doesn't matter where the quiet place was; it doesn't matter which toothy metropolis one returns to - the result is still shell shock. Sounds have amplified, as have the smells, speeds, the frantic paths woven by people making their way from one suspect engagement to another. Kabir says the city will be uninhabitable in 20 years. This city, any city. I'd say a lot sooner.

Two evenings in a row, I enter the coffee shop were I used to pose every day in writerly affectation. Just to check. 'Cannot even sit down, let alone consume anything. The body slides past people inconspicuously, speaks infrequently and in low voice, seeks not much more than hibernation and a home-cooked meal. To a careless observer, newly sane would look a lot like deeply neurotic.

Other things are on course, though, and make perfect sense. The pantheon, the mountains, the paintbox one sits with every day. Eclipse that shows through dense fog. Strident barbets in the jamun tree. Mindfully kneaded dough. Ascetics - endangered species - who live more simply than one could dare to imagine. Nothing is harder than simple.

Red Rivers

Painting tests, Parva/The Epic, © Amruta Patil 2010
On display at La Maison des Auteurs, Angouleme from 26th Jan-26th Feb 2010

Rivalries, Curses

painting tests, parva/the epic, © amruta patil 2009

Back with the old Parva/The Epic style from 2003 - layer upon layer upon layer. Hope for unwavering blessings and stacks of old magazines to cut up.

Plotline / How Sex Lost It

Babel Fish, First City Magazine © amruta patil 2009

a story about the collective fixation. dealing with all my favourite themes again (certain character on a certain snake even makes a cameo appearance). assuredly, i have no future writing erotica.

'pure world' color tests

kashyap with kadru and vinata, parva/the epic, © amruta patil 2009

this is the personal mountain one climbs every day - some days one slips all the way down, some days one presses forward in precious inches. if i'm ever to complete this work, will need to shed several skins first. how hard to paint without heavy handedly sullying the palette, without slipping into the easy impactfulness of edgy. how hard not to seek graphic solace in distorting and 'stylizing' human forms.

i look at my old work and shudder at ghoulishness that peeps out from behind the very best of intent. beauty loses currency in the visual/verbal world; while to spit, tear, deposit your innards, or wrap your old wad of gum in paper becomes avant-garde. who are we fooling, and why.

Vasuki relented, and the churning began

Color test, Parva/The Epic, © Amruta Patil 2009

Pomegranate and pink mountain

pomegranate from tea cup. pink mountain from parva/the epic

Cud

For the Food Special Issue of First City magazine, © Amruta Patil, 2009

even a wristwatch-free year will inch toward winter

angoulême trees opt for monochrome austerity again. the sky will have nonesuch.

Sterile

this is what we do. take a living body, sanitize it. fight to fumigate lifestyle off it. erase all olfactory cues of good health and compatibility. then we sterilize it - wilfully, chemically. do our cells complain about the treachery - about how many potentially pointless biological encounters surround us? does it make it impossible to trust our instinct about who we like, who we don't? does it make it necessary to serially disengage after engaging? having been wakened once, one can smell the deception - imposters smelling like a bouquet of flowers, flowers foolishly slathering themselves in unguent and deodorant.

As Icarus

Random Access Memory, First City magazine, © Amruta Patil, 2009

in the name of the mother

Random Access Memory, First City magazine, © Amruta Patil, 2009

storyboard and other mountains

self-doubt is useful, but the opposite of being puppishly gung-ho is being paralysed by inaction. i am cautioned at every step - why this, who are you, what is new, do you have the eyes, the content matter is too trodden, impractical, risky. the questions are valid, of course. they do the essential - slow me down, shake off smugness, keep greed at bay. most skepticism, though, is of the idle variety - dismissal and little else. the other kind - far rarer - comes with a key of hope in its hand. fire may only be guarded by the worthy - it is no one's to own.

breaking the egg before time

Parva/The Epic, Book of Queens © Amruta Patil, 2009

There lay Vinata's son Arun, strong of chest and unformed of legs. For her impatience, he cursed her to five hundred years of slavery - until such a day that the one of golden feathers set her free.

unbearable heaviness of joint palms

have drawn dozens of characters for Parva like the one above, arms folded at elbow, palms joint in 'namaste' (नमः ते i honour you) - many of them with their head bowed, body language soft with submission and humility। but after a recent visit to a gurukul, one thing becomes clear - my drawings are patently unsincere। we are so unbendy - it's incredibly hard, impossible even, for most to pull off a single such display with any degree of sincerity. needless to say, 'namaste auntyji, hello uncleji' brand of flyaway gestures merit no headcount.

nombrilists

Random Access Memory, First City magazine, © Amruta Patil, 2009

Guilty, guilty, guilty as charged. And the sweetness of this being on a blog called Umbilical.

between worlds

the blue lord sleeps
Parva/The Epic, Book of Queens, © Amruta Patil, 2009