I came across this notebook of drawings that I made with a stick of bamboo on bamboo paper with Indian ink, they are from Hampi, in India. I spent four months in India in 1997 and kept a diary and drew in notebooks all the time.
Hampi is the site of the ruins of Vijayangar. It was once the capital of one of the largest Hindu empires in Indian history. This desolate land strewn with enormous rounded boulders is the most unlikely place you'd imagine a city that once housed over 1/2 million people!
I described it in my notebooks 'This is the most magical land... and the strangest Christmas that I have spent on earth. Long nightmarish journeys on hellish buses.
One of the strangest phenomenons of these night trips is the monstrous chai stands in the middle of nowhere. In the dead of night the bus pulls into a maniac chai stand. Blaring Hindi music emanates from loudspeakers. The giant concrete building pulsates with flashing Christmas lights. It looks like the chai stand at the end of the universe. A mad sight! Everyone piles off the bus to sup chai. I am too drowsy to sup chai...
Ah! Hampi, our recluse, our haven for a while.... Stretched out in front of me, giant boulders nest by the chocolate shores of a river that cuts through this land. Land tiered, bright green paddy fields. We walk through plantations of banana and coconut.'
I traveled with Owen and met Paul in Naintal at the beginning of our trip. We all traveled together for about 6 weeks of the trip.
I am on the home straight, after months of painting I am finishing up my book this week. It always is pretty intense finishing a book, for me anyway. There is nothing like a looming deadline to put the pressure on. Last weekend Owen took the kids away for a couple of days and I painted all weekend.
I have next week to wrap up and clean up the artwork get it sent off to Walker. Last night after going through everything I realised that I had forgotten one entirely. My brain told me that I had painted it already because I imagined it so clearly. But no art was to be found for the page.
CHILDREN ARE visually literate, and make excellent book choices given half a chance. The failing is often with adults choosing the cliched fairy and truck books. When children are left to choose their own titles, they can often make surprising discoveries for themselves. It is a great way of letting them take control.
Children don’t read the blurb, they don’t read the publishers’ bumf or care what prizes a title has won. Most of the small ones can’t read. So what do they do? They read pictures; they judge a book by its cover, and they go with their gut instinct.
So with this in mind I conducted an experiment. When all the review copies came in from The Irish Times, I placed them randomly around the room. I wanted to see what my kids, picture-book readers, Oscar aged five and Aoibhe aged three, were immediately drawn to. Neither of them can read yet.
Read the rest of the article here.
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