BUTTERFLIES TO THE BALLET!

  

 We asked Momo, my long-time associate & social media maven at GRB BELLS, to join us last month to see the Pacific Northwest Ballet's new production of The Sleeping Beauty. We dressed up! 

 In good part, our initial impetus toward this event was the design & costumes. The stage design is by Preston Singletary, a glass artist whose work we have appreciated for years. He is a musician as well, with a history including a stint with Rumors Of The Big Wave, a popular Seattle band in the 1990's, the principal members of which we know well, Charlie Murphy & Jami Sieber.

 The set he designed has a bridge formed as an eagle in the form line design style of NW Coast Native Cultures... Preston is Tlingit.

 It changes & evolves as additional parts move into play. The action & dancers move over, under & through the space

 The costumes were also themed in similar form line style 

 

The overall effect was stunning!

Not unlike the mountain we revere through our home's windows & on our daily walks! 

INDIA... KOLKATA

The first destination on our month's travel in Asia was Kolkata, India. It was our second visit with Sharad Ghai, who we met through Michael Hathaway. Sharad is a gifted networker and administrator. Michael (who died at Soundcliff, our Vashon house, on 1/2/19) brought Sharad to one of the Thanksgiving events for which Soundcliff had become (a bit too!) famous some decades ago. [Ah, so many stories!]

Our first day, while Sharad had a working day, we made a tour of this old capitol city's historic core. We found a coffee in a part of the Post Office, whimsically furnished with refinished old desks in bright colors catching my eyes. Notice the red furniture above.

We were interested to find something & although there were places we passed set-up to serve folks along one sidewalk, making temping choices, we were wisely chary of eating such street food.

We found a museum, where a hanging pierced piece greeted us, creating beautiful shadows on the floor... the intricacy of this culture's craft is seen frequently

 

 

Another gallery presented huge wall sized image of Tagore...

We had become curious about the Hindu poet and educator Rabindranath Tagore (Stephen had read some of his metaphysical prose when he was in high school...) who we quickly were made aware Sharad had some connection... in geography, if nothing else. Sharad's father had built a second home near Shantiniketan, Tagore's family home, which became a college.  Sharad took us first to the Tagor families

 Rabindranath was never a traditional scholar, but became a polymath: scholar, poet, musician, painter, philosopher... acquainted with Einstein & Gandhi. I was happy to take an unexpected education for a day or two...  being even now slowly enriched. Exotic & mysterious as it is, Mother India continues to be a deeper, broader, depository of knowledge than I was ever exposed to in my past... yet another gap in my education. 

We stayed at a curiously wonderful home stay across the street from the university.  In the morning, Sharad took us on a walk to see the campus.  The buildings housing the art department were decorated with handsome geometric murals.

 

There were outdoor work spaces for dying fabrics...

There are several homes built for members of this progressive family which spanned multiple generations of literate, artistic & internationally known philanthropic and philosophic intellectuals.

I love the mechanique of old printing presses. This one must have a deep history in this place of progressive ferment...

I wonder at this curious glass shade for a street lamp...

The ride home revealed a bit of also lovely evening reflection...

It also brought us back into the crowds of the city streets... the breadth this country teaches us each time we return to explore...

INDIA: UDAIPUR - PACIFIC ART

 

 

Naresh is a complex story... he & his brother Jeetu are artists, trained by their father [& 3 previous generations] in a very traditional style of Indian painting. We have bought & commissioned several paintings from them during interim years since a "chance" (or was it fated?) so, yes, I suppose a fated meeting... knowing ever better how Mother India works in such various ways. Stephen was out on an errand outside the gate of Amet Haveli, where we have stayed on both of our visits to Udaipur, when he  encountered Naresh, looking to bring customers to a studio & gallery which he & his brother have nearby... PACIFIC ART. A connection was made.

 

They have kept in touch during the difficult times the tourist business in India has suffered during  pandemic's curtailment of travel & we have been helping them with whatever business we can offer... when it seems useful, logical & honest. What Stephen celebrates as "shoe-leather philanthropy" can become complicated when working & dancing between different social & economic realities! That is complexity indeed.

Above we pose together at the entrance to their store... This space is used as adjunct studio space, but the weather is often clement enough to encourage them to paint on the portable panels on which they paint...  inviting the curiosity of passersby.

They also offer classes for visitors wanting to share in study of their heritage... it can become a lively time! Being an artist who has long lived intimately with my own studios for decades, I appreciate & celebrate the joys & vicissitudes(!) of such a lifestyle.

Being more removed, I have mostly chosen to keep a cautious distance while Stephen danced closer to the edges of the situation. Jeetu's two young sons often joined the numerous phone calls I sometimes overheard. Stephen's love of youngsters & education has embraced a role of encouraging them to practice more usefully the English they are studying in school. I can only appreciate the important rarity of such two-way opportunity between several sides of a world needing such sharing conversation. Being bright & boisterous, they've become in our (and the family's) loving humor, "the Monkey Boys."  

Stephen had also talked to the patriarch of this family, who he also met during those calls, learning of the illness which eventually became fatal. He chose to help the family to take the body to Varanasi for cremation on the banks of the Ganges... cherished by Hindu belief. We've had several experiences being parts of that cultural diaspora. He has long been a global citizen & I feel privileged to join as a novice!

 

 We do love India...  & we cherish being part of a diaspora which a guest at the family wedding we attended in 2005 considered us to have joined. It offers larger & richer value than our country's current political situation might suggest!

Inside this, my first meeting of yet another Indian family, I could celebrate better acceptance of the diaspora, which makes us both something of genuine importance to this family. We were invited to visit their home, also in the neighborhood, & to join them for several meals. This is the kind of experience we love as the best way to learn at more depth while we travel.

These photos share the family at dinner; the first taken by Jeetu... includes their mother, who still lives with them [more accurately they still live with her in the family's home] & the boys' mother, all having roles in ancient familial custom. The meal was served on Naresh's big bed, he, as eldest son, having become the Patriarch. The women occupied places on the floor, often peering at soap operas on a TV screen. Some aspects of culture are not always perfectly comfortable for us.

A second shot, this time by Naresh, includes Jeetu.

 

I had a visceral attraction to this piece by Jeetu when I first saw it while he was working on it in the sun outside the shop. While I like the color work, I was very impressed by his sure draftsmanship in the drawing of the group of people, yet to be painted with the hand-ground pigment. 

 

 

  

I love fine pencil-work... that being a medium in which I often play. I chose to acquire a finished version, while also tried suggest to them I believed the raw simplicity of less "finished" version's style might find a market further afield like an American or European avant-garde gallery. ... Is its simplicity & openness "more abstract"? Or don't I simply love pencil?

 

My notion was too avant... too ahead of their immediate comprehension & understanding, although they appreciated my compliments, & ripped it rather dramatically loose from the panel & presented it to me. They are painted on thin tough silk fabric pasted down with, I suspect, rice flour. [I need to educate myself.] Both are being framed now & I'm thinking they might be hung so as to be seen between two rooms- one echoing the other. 

 

I'll thank them daily for facilitating another story in my dancing between cultures!

This is some of our collection of their work:

These two were painted from photographs we sent. First a shot of our garden at Soundcliff, which reminds us of our life before we moved to the condo with only a few pots on a deck...

& this of us standing on a maze.

 

Naresh often has taken Stephen on video tours of the temples where he visits to worship.. often to the one we could see from the dining terrace of Amet Haveli. When we visited the priest allowed him to take us up to the roof to take-in the view, showing us more of the elegant architecture of the city which is the setting for many of their paintings, but the unexpected, pleasant surprise to my sensibility's eyes, was the paving on the roof terrace... random mosaic of broken pottery shards!

 

Contrasting the formality of the distant island palace & the ancient royal pleasure boat in the lake beyond.

The boats which cruised by our window looking for sunset were simpler, yet still romantic affairs...

We could easily be enticed to consider a third visit to this Indian "Venice"!

INDIA: Udaipur, Amet Havali

Originally built in the early 1700's as a Water Palace for the Maharana of Mewar, it's now the Amet Haveli... a Heritage Hotel where we stayed on a previous trip to Rajasthan, in northwest India. Udaipur being integral with its several lakes, is sometimes compared to Venice. This is the view of the hotel's water side, which we could not see, our suite being on the second floor left hand front corner of the blocky (newer) part of the building. Later photos here will show how the proximity to this water offers a cooling aspect to the heat of summer season.

This is the view from the gate & reception area of a style we'd seen frequently when we first visited Ragisthan called a haveli -- a fine town home built for show & entertaining, often also used for business.  Our room on our first visit was a fair climb up those tall central steps to the bay of windows on the left side of the third floor from the pavement... an altogether romantic place, especially because one could climb further up to intimate pavilions on the rooftop... visible in this photo. We were drawn to return to meet again several friends we met then & with whom we've continued communicating.

This rambling structure suits our several styles of a gentle opulence couched in deep history & natural beauty. A simple stucco lantern along a circuitous route, through enclosed passages & open courtyards, to an iron stairway to find & re-find our suite over these days of this second visit is an example of that style...

 

I might, after such assertions, have more complex notions about that suite...

Lovely... &... well...

... perhaps a bit "over scalloped" ?

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Ceilings mosaic-ed with richly subtle inlaid mirror...

Another window alcove for me into which I settled to journal...  inside becoming a bit of the fabulous view.

 I might be pretending the Maharana...

This photo shows my earlier experience of the same process in 2019...

 After dark the lights across the water becomes even more magical...

Many small pavilions along the walkways offer small spots to stop for viewing or visiting...

 

Some with elaborate ceilings...

 

A small shrine to Ganesha... Lord of Beginnings, and both the placer and the remover of obstacles... is seen on a corridor...

The dining terrace hanging over the water was stunning for breakfast, lunch & even more so for dinner...

A frame for portraits...

 

There are a few stately trees... this one on the way to the local Hindu temple...

 

This is where Naresh, one of those we came to revisit, comes in...

 

[See the next post... ]