Return to India
Travel and the experience of new places has always been a way of gathering ideas and stories to use in my painting.
Over the last ten years my choice of destination has been India, a place of colour, chaos, beauty, the sacred and the profane and a place of many stories.
India is a large country, each area with its own distinct character. I have travelled from southern India to Rajasthan in the north, by train, plane, car, tuk-tuk, motorbike, each offering a glimpse into India's wonders and diverse landscape. Covid restricted my travels, but finally in January, I made it back out to India.
During past trips I used large thick sketchbooks I had made in Pushkar in Rajasthan, to refer to when back in the studio. On this trip I took heavy weight paper to create paintings directly there to bring back as finished work.
My trip started in Kerala, where I rented a shack near the beach surrounded by palm trees with coconuts occasionally falling onto the roof. I was surrounded by nature, birds of all kinds, the stream was full of frogs and snakes and the palms were the shelter for numerous creatures including one large spider who liked popping through the toilet window.
Fishermen were busy with their nets and the sea was calm and warm. Painting the coconut collectors as they climbed the palms or the weathered pink shack which was my home for a month. The backwaters of Kerala are magical, and I go on slow punted boat rides taking in the atmosphere. On one occasion to Golden Island, a small island in the middle of a large lake with a Hindu temple. I decided to paint there for a few hours.
After my stay in Kerala, I moved on to Rajasthan, a place of beautiful palaces, forts, and colourful chaotic cities. First stop Jaipur where I painted on the roof of a Haveli where I stayed and at various temples, palaces, and forts around Jaipur before moving on to Bundi, by way of a four-hour white-knuckle taxi drive. Bundi has an amazing palace and has the feel that the last residents only left yesterday. It has beautiful wall paintings all around the palace and barely visited so a place to paint and imagine it when it was full of life and colour. I painted 'The Small Windows of the Past' there.
Next stop Pushkar which I always love going back to. A sacred lake surrounded by pink hills and with the only temple in India dedicated to Lord Brahma. People visit the lake to bath in its sacred waters. I stop to paint around the lake taking in the serenity of the surroundings. There I work on the 'The Sacred Mountain Lake'.
My trip , before heading back to Mumbai, finishes in the blue city of Jodhpur.
The narrow winding streets take you through the blue painted buildings whilst looking up to an ancient fort on the hill. 'Temple Steps', which I paint later, back in my studio, was influenced by this stay.
My two-month trip comes to an end in Mumbai but not without thoughts of a return soon.
Paul Wadsworth, May 2023