India – Early Morning

I recently made another trip to visit India, the fourth time I have gone there and every visit is unique. This time instead of concentrating on crafts we were visiting some of the great heritage sights in Central India. I hope to produce a number of posts based on the photos I took but for a start here are a few pics of a beautiful morning spent in a beautiful heritage hotel.

The Neemrana Deo Bagh in Gwalior is a fabulous place to stay. Converted from a 17th century aristocrat’s residence, it features two 17th-18th century temples, two cenotaphs and a beautiful arched pavilion all within the grounds. What an amazing place to wake up in!

The grounds of Deo Bagh are renowned for the variety of bird life

Making a new acquaintance

The tranquil light of morning

The Ranakpur Jain Temple

Today I am focussing on the spectacular marble Jain temple in the village of Ranakpur, near Udiapur.  This beautiful 500-year-old building is a stunning piece of architecture most notable for the quality and variety of its carved surface decoration.

The marble Jain temple at Ranakpur

The turrets and domes of the temple are supported on over 1,400 pillars, each one with its own individual and unique carvings.

Every pillar has its own unique carvings

My favourite parts of the decoration were the amazing circular reliefs that formed the underside of the cupolas on the roof.

Carving on the ceiling under a dome

More than anything else, it is the sheer quality of the invention in the carved patterns that is so stunning, plus, of course the marvellous execution.

Jaw-dropping rhythm and movement in the design of a carving

Many of you must think that I am obsessed by India given the number of posts I have
devoted to it. The truth is that I had the chance to photograph so many beautiful
and interesting things on my visit there and I keep thinking of yet one more
that deserves to be shared.

The marble Jain temple at Ranakpur

Entrance to the marble temple

Jaw-dropping rhythm and movement in the design of a carving

The structure took 50 years to complete

The temple has around 20 cupolas each with its own circular carving beneath

Carving on the ceiling under a dome

The temple structure is tiered like a wedding cake

This photograph gives an impression of the massive scale of the building

Every pillar has its own unique carvings

Visitors to the temple are likely to get neckache from looking up!

Worshippers leaving the temple

Carving surrounds the entrance door

Related posts: Jyoti’s Pages; India Travel Portal; Heather Castle’s Blog;
Saiprema’s Blog

London Museum Favourites

Last weekend, we delivered our daughter Isla (and all her belongings!) to London ready to start a new job and we took the chance to visit some of our favourite museums. I love visiting museums, especially ones that I’m very familiar with, as I always get to revisit objects that are old favourites and always discover some new ones. In a familiar museum you don’t have the pressure to visit every inch on display, but instead can take the time to take in the objects that really catch your eye.

Here are some photographs of favourite things to be found in the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum. Alex and I snapped things that took our eye as we were walking round and spent a lot of time in the Chinese collections, so the mix is a bit idiosyncratic but you’ll hopefully find it interesting!

The V&A building itself, with its eccentric mix of Victorian red brick and classical design, always delights me.

The South-Asian section of the V&A has some marvellous carved sandstone window screens.

Regulars will know that I love old doors. Here is an English one in the V&A

Alex loves the clean iconic forms and translucent surfaces of ancient Chinese jade ritual blades (V&A)

We both love the patina on ancient Chinese bronzes (British Museum)

Alex thinks that some of my work reminds him of the shapes found decorating ancient Chinese bronze vessels? (British Museum)

I love this little chap! Chinese bronze (British Museum)

Abstract art from 2,000 years ago? Chinese jade object (British Museum)

The experience of visiting the major London museums is changing, as quite a few now offer free wi-fi, allowing you to use your phone or iPod to search for instant information on the objects you are looking at. This advance made our visit much more interesting and accessible, as we looked up everything from indigo to Equus. Visit a museum again soon!

Cows in India

This post includes some of my photos of India’s bovine inhabitants.
When I photograph the Cornish landscape there are usually some cows in the shot (or ponies, or sheep!) but in India, the cows are not simply statues studding the landscape, they are the photograph.
These photos show cows with individual personalities, who would provide plenty of inspiration for a caption competition!

And your tour guide today is….. (love the sign)

All by myself. Sniff.

Places to go, people to see!

Sulking.  (This is the drying yard at the fabric printing workshop we visited)

This handsome fellow was posing for the tourists like a Bollywood star

Hard at work

And… this is not a cow – Thought I would slip in a photo of a hoity-toity camel!

Indian Palace Ornament

On my trip to Rajasthan in February we visited a lot of palaces and temples as well as seeing craft producers. Everywhere we went there was fascinating architecture and amazing decoration. The Maharajas who lived in the palaces were not into minimalist interior design, every surface was covered in rich and sumptuous decoration. This surface ornamentation varied from the breathtakingly beautiful to the frankly tasteless but it was never dull. My camera should have been red-hot with the number of shots I took. The few photographs I present to you here are just a taste of the ornamentation found in a number of Rajasthan palaces.Deprived of real power by the British, the Indian princes put much of their
great wealth into building these deliberately impressive palaces and filling
them with extravagant objects. It is not really clear who was meant to be
impressed, whether the subjects of these princes, their foreign overlords, or if they
were simply trying to convince themselves of their own greatness, but there was
certainly a lot of effort put into the enterprise.

While these palaces do have a distinctive style of their own, I was struck by how many of the decorative motifs used were not particularly Indian in feeling and were in fact vaguely familiar. It took a while before I realised that a good deal of the decoration could have been taken directly from “The Grammar of Ornament” by Owen Jones. The style of decoration in these palaces appears to be drawn, not just from the Indian tradition but from a Victorian British aesthetic as well.

Owen Jones was a Victorian architect and designer who published his major work “The Grammar of Ornament” in 1856. This classic work was a great influence on successive generations of designers and provided both inspiration and source material for major Arts and Crafts figures such as William Morris and William De Morgan. The book is still available in print today.
“The Grammar of Ornament” was an investigation into the design motifs of varied cultures and periods but Owen, by a process of selection and subtle transformation, managed to transform all his sources until they looked unmistakeably Victorian.

Inspiring market stalls

I love shopping at outdoor markets and places where shops have street displays. Even the most mundane fruit and vegetables can look much more colourful and inviting there than they ever do in a pristine supermarket display. When I travel abroad I particularly enjoy wandering around local markets and taking in all the colour. Here are a few photographs from my trips to India, plus an old favourite from China.

Outdoor market in Jaipur

Local street market in Rajasthan

Umbrellas for sale lying beside a market stall

Stall selling Festival flowers – South India

Stall selling Festival dyes – South India

Beautiful dried fruit display – Dunhuang, China

Crafts of India – Hand Embroidery

On my Indian trip in February, we visited a village near Jodhpur where all the women in one extended family were producing very fine hand-embroidered fabrics. The pieces made were mostly large and very intricate, many taking weeks to complete. Learning a little about how these women produced such neat and painstaking work was very interesting.

Most embroidery was done on cotton cloth, ranging from moderately heavyweight fabric to the finest semi-transparent muslins. Silk is also used to a lesser extent. Stitching was mainly done using gold, silver and white threads. Most of the fabric used was white in colour but some work is also done on bright materials. On many pieces they also stitched sequins into the design, while some other work featured intricate beadwork. Most of the embroidered fabrics are sold for use as bedcovers, though some tourists want them as curtains or wall hangings.

The big secret to their process was that the fabric is first printed with very faint guidelines which the women then embroider over. The printing is done from woodblocks made by one of the men from the same family. The women did a lot of the work with the cloth stretched between two bars on a horizontal frame and worked on one small section at a time. They gradually rolled the cloth from one bar to the other so that they could reach all parts of it.

Hand embroidery using a horizontal frame

Another product the women were making was hand-embroidered uppers for traditional Indian slippers. Slippers of this type are widely seen but the embroidery work produced by these very talented ladies was particularly fine.

Hand embroidered upper for a slipper

Below is a slipper of the type being embroidered (this one was embroidered by someone else.)

Indian embroidered slipper

Hand embroidery using a horizontal frame

Hand embroidered upper for a slipper

Indian embroidered slipper

Related posts (Crafts of India): Rug Weaving; Block Printing; Fabric Dyeing; Papermaking.

Indian Doors

I find doors interesting. The door to a home marks a border; a dividing line between outside and inside; between “ours” and “theirs.” Old doors that have seen a lot of history have a character all of their own. They can say a lot about the sort of people who have lived there.
When I was in Rajasthan, India earlier this year I photographed a lot of doors. Here is a selection of them.

This ancient rusting iron door was amazing!

Detail of the door above

The rusting iron door-frame

And of course, with a door there is always the possibility of a glimpse inside.

In another post soon I will show you some doors from China.

Crafts of India – Rajasthan Rug Weaving

While in Rajasthan early this year we went to visit the weaver’s village of Salawas, where the craftsmen make traditional Durries (woven rugs). There we saw the master rugmaker Roopraj Prajapati at the Roopraj Durry Udhyog Cooperative.

The Durry (or Durrie) is woven in such a way as to make it fully reversible. They are commonly woven in cotton but the craftsmen also use silk, wool, goat hair and camel hair. The weavers work on a flat loom and only use a blade and a pick as tools. A wide range of traditional designs are produced, most patterns deriving from the Marwar culture to which the villagers belong.

Roopraj Prajapati

Cotton yarns are bought in pre-dyed to the required colours

Roopraj Prajapati demonstrating the working of his loom

Roopraj Prajapati at work

Weaving tools

We saw a beautiful range of designs

Durrie

Durries in a range of traditional designs

Packing durries for shipment

Pink India

People in India love to surround themselves with colour.
When I went there in February I noticed that among all the other bright colours, there was so much pink to be seen. (In England a confident woman can wear pink but it is a fairly rare colour in the general environment unless you stumble into the girl’s section of a toy shop.)

I could easily have filled a post with garish “chemical” pinks. Instead, here is a fairly random assortment of photographs showing colour ranging from the loud PINK! to the very subtle pinkish.

Sunset Over the Blue City

Jodhpur, on the edge of the Thar desert in Rajasthan is known as the “Blue City” after the colour of the houses. The colour results from mixing indigo into the limewash used to paint the buildings. The effect is most spectacular when viewed against a warm suset.
A beautiful place to visit!

The riding breeches known as jodphurs were developed by Sir Pratap Singh, son of the Maharaja of Jodphur, for playing polo in around 1890. When he brought his polo team to England in 1897 they were a big hit in fashion circles.

Lord of All He Surveys

I spotted this fellow gazing down at his subjects in Jaipur:

Crafts of India: Block Printing

While visiting the village of Bagru, near Jaipur, I had the chance to watch people  making traditional Indian block-printed fabrics. The craftsmen of Bagru cut the wood blocks by hand and use only eco-friendly vegetable dyes in the painstaking process, rinsing the fabric between colours. Although basic hand relief block printing is a familiar technique, it was incredible to see people using such techniques on a commercial scale – it can take days to print an entire bolt of fabric, or weeks if the design is more complex.

Colours of India

Here is a photograph I love for the amazing colours. Taken in Rajasthan February 2012.

Crafts of India – Fabric Dyeing

The village of Bagru, outside Jaipur in Rajasthan has long been associated with fine craft textiles. Here we saw fabrics being dyed and printed using traditional eco-friendly hand methods. The dyes used are taken from natural vegetable sources, such as indigo for blue, pomegranate rind mixed with indigo for green, madder root for red and turmeric for yellow. Alum is used as a mordant (the chemical used to fix the colours).

Below are a few photos of the dyeing process.

Vat full of indigo dye.

Vat containing turmeric.

Dyeing with indigo – the colour is intense!

The dyed fabric is rinsed after fixing.