Shweta Taneja follows a group of fledgling artists as they record the city’s public spaces.
One sunny Sunday afternoon in June, a man dawdling around Vidhana Soudha came upon a group of people, all bent over their notebooks, sketching furiously with pencils, charcoals and pens. Surprised, he joined a meandering row of bystanders surrounding this group, wondering what the group was doing. The group was used to such curiosity and continued to sketch unperturbed. Indeed, members of that group, Sketchcrawlers, have put their instruments to paper without once flinching under the gaze of all those curious bystanders every two months for a year now. “The most surprising reaction we got was last year at UB City,” said Anand Bora, a software professional, who has been part of this group for a year now. “We were meeting a month after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The security personnel of the building refused to let us enter and sketch the building as they were suspicious of our ‘activities’.” Lesson learnt, they started meeting at open spaces like Lalbagh. “The whole idea of Sketchcrawl is to record the city through sketches for a day, so public spaces work perfectly for us,” explained 29-year-old Rohit Kulkarni, who began the group in Bangalore after moving to the city from Delhi last year.
Sketchcrawl as a movement was started in Los Angeles about seven years ago, by Enrico Casarosa, an artist. He decided to set aside one day every two months as “a whole day of intense drawing around the city”. The idea was to record everything he saw around him with pencils and watercolours. “It was to be a drawn journal filled with details ranging from the coffee I drank to the different buses I took,” Casarosa wrote on the group’s website www.sketchcrawl.com. He soon figured that if he did this in a group, it would be more fun, so he turned it into a communal activity, and then, thanks to the internet, went global. “There were different takes on our surroundings, different details, different sensibilities,” he wrote. “We opened an online forum to record our results of a day of sketching and journaling.” Now, on designated Sketchcrawl days, the community sees sketch entries from as many as 80 different countries across the world uploaded on their forum.
Kulkarni came across the website and decided to start this in Delhi. So on the designated international Sketchcrawl day, he would travel around the city, sketching and uploading his work along with his worldwide counterparts. “I used to go out alone as there weren’t many people who wanted to risk charting out in the blazingly hot Delhi weather,” said Kulkarni. That changed last year, when he moved to Bangalore, all thanks to its cooler climate, he said. He got together with about ten people interested in the idea and the group met once every month for an afternoon of sketching.
“Most of us are not from a design or artistic profession. We are just interested in sketching,” he explained. The group has graphic designers, software professionals, students and several others. “Most of us want to do it [draw] but we are not disciplined enough to set aside time, as it’s a hobby and we have other professions. But when we come together, there’s encouragement as well as a certain commitment,” he said.
Besides this, the group is not bound to deliver a certain quality of craftsmanship. Since there are no rules, each participant sets his or her own goals. Kulkarni wanted to speed up his sketching skills and not redo anything, so he uses an ink pen on these visits and sketches while standing.
“It’s not the place we aim to sketch; it’s our experiences. Different people sketch differently. When we met at the Bull Temple, for example, there was a dog lying there having his afternoon nap. A lot of us tried to sketch him rather than the temple,” said Kulkarni. For Smriti Krishna, a 30-year-old graphic designer, it provided freedom from being self-conscious. “If I am sketching outdoors alone, I feel very conscious, but in a group, the camaraderie makes it comfortable,” she said. Apart from this, there is an exchange of ideas as everyone uses different techniques. Bora, who is a computer programmer and has what he called a technical eye, has been learning more about “perception and proportion as seen from a creative perspective”. “I always looked at the architectural shapes mathematically, but a French guy I met in one of the group meets taught me how I can look at it creatively as well,” he explained.
Source : Time Out Bengaluru ISSUE 1 Friday, July 23, 2010
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