Feeling the Blues!

As you may have noticed in my previous blogs, He allures me in different ways and painting Him is a joy and I can smile for days afterwards. Again He came as a friend asking me to paint Him and it was almost like He painted Himself.

Blue hues remind me of only one - Krishna. A teacher told me once why Krishna is symbolised in a blue color - the sky is blue - why... The sky is infinite and so is Krishna. Infinite..

I painted just His hands playing the flute on one side of the board and nothing more (see below). But the mind said that it was not enough and so on the other side I painted Him playing the flute. I know you will question me why I could not take another board and start fresh but sometimes I just dont think too much :( For a change, I did paint His eyes, His lips, His nose, His hair....I close my eyes and I see His serene face.

A Burst of Colors in a Feather

We wandered into the Temple of 10,000 Buddhas in August (no, I did not add an extra 0 by mistake, it was 10,000 Buddhas and it was the most serene place ever!) and the campus was filled with peacocks. It is said Buddhists associate "openness" with peacocks since the birds display their entire plummage with pride and openness!! The beauty lingered in the mind and a few days back, a friend suggested an idea of Krishna and I wanted to do more of a symbolism rather than paint the Lord Himself. The peacock came back strutting into the mind and dropped a feather :)

I painted the peacock feather in bright hues with turquoises, cerulean blues, phthalo greens, violets and burnt sienna. Each stroke of the acrylic made the feather brilliant and vibrant and I completed it in 3 hours. The effect is beautiful from far and when one ventures closer, the squiggliness of the brush strokes are quite evident. I wondered later if the strokes could have been sharper and defined perhaps in oil or even with oil pastels; but acrylics have always been my first love in paints.

And then Krishna wanted to be obviously visually present there on the feather. Aditi suggested painting Him on the stem of the feather or inside the eye of the feather. But I added a 3D version by painting Him in black on cardstock, cutting the image out and you can see Him perched on top of the painting. To give you a sense of dimensions, the Krishna cutout is about 6 inches from toe to his peacock feather) I love this painting even more now with him playing His flute and it adorns our mantlepiece. May His flute music fill our lives...