My Travelogues: Somewhere over the Rainbow

Some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in Switzerland – yet this post about the same is one of the shortest on my blog. I suppose nature, in its most elevated glory, can neither be painted, photographed nor written about. It can just be experienced.

Had the impressionists come to Switzerland to paint, not only would they have had a stroke, they also would have, eventually, abandoned their art in disillusion. They would have realized that Swiss nature can never be tamed onto a canvass; it can never ever be conquered. At least that’s how i felt when i saw the larger than life trees and mountains swirling up around me.

When we saw the Interlaken lakes, we were not impressed…no…but startled and confused. This blue…where had it come from? I don’t even know if that color can be called blue – it really merits a new name of its own. I had never seen it in any other part of the world, and never would, even if I tried to shop for it in a Saari and petticoat matching store

The tiny cottages dotting the river and hill sides, with cows wearing bells grazing in their back yards, reminded me of a world I once knew of in fairy tales.

And the people! They weren’t people, but sugar dandies walking on two legs. My friend, on exchange in Switzerland, told me of an incident he had on his first day in the country. Lost, he asked a fellow passenger on the bus for directions to his hostel. She got off on the bus stop along with him and escorted him all the way to his hostel. Once he was safe and sound, she once again caught the bus to go back home, for her actual stop was some way off from the one she had gotten off at!

And in that moment, when I first broke through the clouds, on my way up to Mt. Titlus, I decided to call this part of my life, this little part spent in Switzerland – “Somewhere over the Rainbow”!

My Travelogues: My Impressions of Art

I feel embarrassed of the Travelogues section on my blog. Over 10 countries visited and no experiences to write about? Hence, I have decided that I will, over the next few days, put down all my “Aha” moments down in writing – and have a look at them once again, when I’m bored of life, and say to myself – “Yes…I too once lived it up!”

Starting from the beginning – when Paris, the cultural capital of Europe had taken my imagination by storm: I feel I am a half-artist, artist because I have so much to express and half because I have been given nothing to express it with. This is why, like a ghost-hunter, I stalked the spirits of Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, Van Gogh, Michelangelo etc through various museum hallways, day after day.

Something must be said about the Musee d’ Orsay, the works of which mark the start of the impressionist movement. Until previously, the true challenge for artists was to get as close to reality as possible. But with the dawn of photography, their talent was rendered obsolete.

The impressionist painters felt that through their art, they should offer an alternative form of expression, and not something parallel to photography.

What is art? It’s not reality, it is an artist’s impression of reality. Gone were the days of stencils and scales, where you used precise and restrained drawing lines to portray forms and then later filled the shapes in with colour. Impressions are fleeting; hence these artists would fill in their canvasses with what they saw (or felt) in a matter of minutes; thus creating works which now cost millions. The impressionists traded precision for emotion – they made their canvasses shimmer by employing violent strokes of paint. Their fiery colors would mirror raw emotions much more closely than they did reality.

You don’t hang an impressionist painting, you tether it. When I see a great impressionist piece of work, my heart skips a beat and suddenly starts floating in an anti-gravity atmosphere. If I could create nature, I would have made it just the way they did.

Their technique was simple but revolutionary. Let’s say you mix red, yellow and green together- you will get brown, right? But the impressionists didn’t bother to mix them. They would slap strokes of these primary colours next to each other. While the colors would blend into brown in your eyes at a distance, your subconscious would shiver with the vibrancy of multiple colors.

Here a few of my favorite impressionist works -

Forgot the artist...

Monet

Monet

By the Sea, Renoir

The Theatre Box, Renoir