Sir J. J. School of Art is a prestigious fine art college in Mumbai known to have produced the best artists in the country. On 8 January, the school organized a drawing competition, Kalavedh, for children upto the 12th grade, including differently-abled children.

The differently-abled children were handled with much care and kindness. They were provided with chairs and tables in a well-lit classroom of the college.

The children were sorted into their age groups and placed accordingly around the campus of the college. Each group had four topics out of which one was to be chosen to draw. The topics were varied ranging from ‘My Favourite Toy’ to ‘Imagine You Have a Super Power’, ‘Combine Two Animals to Create a New One’, ‘Imagine How God Would Look’ and ‘My Fantasy World’. The pupils had brought all their drawing sets and art material. Some were even dressed in uniform to represent their schools.

The duration of the competition was 2 hours 30 minutes. Three winners from each age group will be selected and awarded with cash prizes. The top 10 students stand a chance to win a scholarship to Korea.

As it was a sunny Sunday, the mood of the children was extremely cheerful. They were made to sit under huge trees around the old architecture of the college. The students of the college volunteered to supervise this event.

The volunteers were generous, patient and understanding towards the children, helping them with assistance to the washroom and providing them with snacks and water. They also assisted the parents and guardians in the sitting area outside the competition premises, handling their queries patiently.

The organizing team did a very detailed job in arranging food for more than 3,000 children and volunteers, and making medical arrangements such as vaccines and first-aid kits in case of emergency. There were police personnel at all entry and exit points to supervise the security of the event.

The children gained an immense sense of competition and creativity due to this competition. If rewarded with a certificate, this will stand strong in future as a mark of early achievement.

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Art prodigy and businessman extraordinaire

At an age when most of us were still drawing doodles in textbooks, Kieron Williamson, aged seven, was already painting and selling his artworks at around 900 euros apiece! Almost as if to prove it was not merely luck, he went on to gain fame and his artworks in exhibitions often sold out in minutes, often for thousands of euros! It’s not often you come across a teen whose parents have become his business employees. Well played, son.

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“Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.”

Ever thought about flower pressing as a hobby? Trust me, the results can brighten up your home and life. More and more people are using pressed flowers as decorative additions to scrapbooks and as handmade gifts.

Here’s some good news — the forgotten hobby of flower pressing is back! According to The Telegraph, the art of pressing flowers, once beloved of Victorian ladies, is on the rise again. It involves drying flowers and flattening or pressing their petals and leaves. An outdoorsy pastime and a method of recording natural history, pressing flowers is the perfect craft for today, combining time spent outdoors with a little bit of patience and seemingly infinite creative variations.

The art of pressing flowers to form decorative images actually dates back to the 1500’s and is called Oshibana. It uses pressed flowers, petals, and other plants to create a detailed picture. Through an interaction between Japan and Europe, Oshibana became a popular art in the Victorian era.

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Tears of ecstasy rolled down my cheeks as I listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and as the choir thundered in German, “Deine Zauber binden wieder, Was die Mode streng geteilt”, I sang along, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder, Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt!”

The music slowly stopped, but tears kept flowing, such the beauty of the rendition, such the power of the composer. And as the Ode to Joy kept resounding in my head, I wondered if this was how heaven would be!

“Bob!” shouts an angel, her wings swishing past me, “Bach is playing down the road!”

Since I’m new to heaven I shout back, “You mean someone is playing Bach’s piece?”

“No!” shouts the angel, “Bach’s doing a new composition,” and I fly along, my own wings swishing as I reach the German composer, and find him entertaining the heavenly audience with a composition he’s just written.

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The Teenager Today’s cover designer and layout artist for the last four decades, Manoj Pal is a painter who regularly displays his works in the art galleries of various cities in the country.

Manoj’s work is an ever-changing landscape of shifting talent and new horizons. His earlier work has always endeared to shaping form and colour onto the canvas but he never aims to please anyone but his own inner thought processes. As a result he is often seen experimenting with new feelings. Where once we witnessed harsh undertones and broken chaos, we may find the next exhibition focused on the inner blueprints of mechanical life.

After many years of working with oil and acrylics on canvas, he wades into new territory and translates his brushstrokes into the digital medium in interesting ways, replicating each of his strokes manually on a pressure-sensitive tablet surface.

Ten years ago, though already established globally as a modern medium, digital art was yet to be taken seriously in India. However, it had a great many takers to its beauty and remains a field where new passions bloom on a very regular basis.

Manoj’s digital painting started with an assignment he was commissioned for by Better Yourself Books, Mumbai, to illustrate a version of the New Testament (Bible). He took the opportunity as a challenge and lifted the digital style to a mature form and started it as a new endeavour to bring his paintbrush with him to the touch screen. Soon India Today published noted classical singer Bhimsen Joshi’s portrait, digitally done by Manoj, on the magazine’s 70th anniversary issue. Traditionally orthodox, the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, displayed two of Manoj’s digital works at their annual exhibition.

One thing of note to an observer of Manoj’s latest exhibition: his many years of patient work on the canvas and study of the way the brushstroke creates emotions has quietly but confidently found its way into all of his new digital paintings. The decades of experience seem to be right at home among printed and framed pieces. Newcomers and enthusiasts alike speak out and marvel at the thought: a brushstroke on an iPad screen? How does a digital painting look like it was handled on canvas when in reality it was made on Wacom’s digital tablet?

One of the biggest names on the Indian art scene, eminent artist Ganesh Haloi said, “These days I come across a lot of digital work, to me they look mechanical; just explain, why your paintings don’t appear like them.” And in Manoj’s mind, it was the greatest compliment he had ever received!

His latest exhibition, a solo, which took place at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, between 31 January and 6 February, is but a continuation of his work to expand his horizons. Doubtless, he’ll be trudging through new fields soon and find new avenues to which he will bring his aged and experienced touch, be it physical or digital.

You can learn more about Manoj Pal at manojpal.co.in

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The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants (the Glass Flowers) is a collection of realistic glass botanical models at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Commissioned by Harvard to introduce botany students to the beauty and complexity of the plant kingdom, it was created by glass artisans Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, a Czech father-son team, from 1887 to 1936. This collection of over 4,300 models representing more than 780 plant species, includes 847 life-size models and 3,000 detail models of plant parts and anatomical sections. Each corolla, leaf, stamen, fruit pod, hair, vein, bracht and petal was handmade by the artists, who moulded glass warmed by a heat lamp with ordinary pincers and tweezers and created each groove and line with a needle. The Glass Flowers are viewed by more than 210,000 visitors annually.

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Cultures are similar yet different. Birthing, worship, puberty, procreation and death occur in all cultures; but their fabric of emotion and execution differ — a case in point of differentiated similitude. Over the centuries, these differences called for vulnerability and one-up humaneness without realising that it was co-operation across these very differences that drove communities and life itself. The humanities incorporate these cultural differences into the structure of teaching, learning and thinking. Today, as we get blinded by competition, we need discovery, imagination, understanding and emotional intelligence more than ever to move beyond polarised opinions and empathise with the global ‘we’. Here is where SAPP comes in — to connect people to their senses and human roots, cherish creativity, and spur thinking and engagement to approach contemporary issues.

Nestled amidst the exuberant environs of St Andrew’s College campus at Bandra, Mumbai, SAPP is a space — the first of its kind in the city — where academicians, research scholars, students, culture enthusiasts, artistes and community members work in a collaborative environment to create rich, engaged learning and teaching experiences in the fields of Art, Literature and Performing Arts.

The birth of SAPP is an interesting story that goes back to the concept of a Summer School at St Andrew’s College. Every year, Fr Magi Murzello runs specialized courses in French language, cookery, baking, etc. This year, he approached me to incorporate a few courses that were ‘different’. It barely took a few minutes of conversation for the two of us to decide that Philosophy and Theatre Writing was the way to go.

In retrospect, these were fairly ambitious courses for a Summer School programme but registrations started coming in instantly. Veteran theatre-wallas and philosophy enthusiasts loved the idea of a Summer School for Theatre Writing and Western Philosophy. Participants poured in from diverse backgrounds and age groups. Both courses were phenomenal experiences and soon the participants were looking forward to the next course. But what would be the next course? Summer School was supposed to be held only over the months of May and June.

In the light of the highly positive feedback received, the visionary in Fr Magi decided that restricting these courses to Summer School was not enough. Suburban Mumbai deserved more. Thus, SAPP — St Andrew’s Centre for Philosophy and Performing Arts — was born in July 2018. Today, it is possibly the only centre in the city which deals with niche courses such as Mysticism, Women and Poetry, Existentialism and Beyond, Theatre and Writing, and Ancient Greek Tragedies. On Saturday and Sunday evenings, SAPP host play performances, tickets for which can be bought from their website (sappmumbai.com) and Bookmyshow.

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Temari is a Chinese needle art that was introduced to Japan in the 7th century. “Te” means hand and “mari” means ball, so the term means “embroidering the surface of a ball”. Temari balls were made from the remains of old kimonos with silk thread used to stitch them together. Eventually, the functional stitching became decorative and the balls evolved into works of art with beautiful embroidered designs. They were gifted to children on New Years’ Day, containing a secret handwritten wish for the child or a noise-making object. Today, Temari patterns include complex mathematical designs in a variety of interlocking geometric shapes. Temari balls are highly cherished gifts, symbolizing deep friendship and loyalty. The colours and the threads symbolize a brilliant and happy life.

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UK-based artist Julie Alice Chappell turns technology into art, using circuit boards found inside discarded electronics. “The recycled bits of cultural refuse that are woven throughout my work represent a direct encounter with the excesses of modern living, highlighting the dangers of planned obsolescence and e-waste in the environment.”

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Artist Michael Volpicelli has a passion for art and peace. His unique portraits use the words of notable peacemakers to create their likenesses. He says, “All these figures suffered horrible hardships within their life yet found a way to remain positive and promote growth with non-violent means.” To create his portrait of Malala Yousafzai, he used the speech that she gave to the United Nations.

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