madguru.net Blog

So..I have returned at last. It’s been an insanely busy few weeks. Usually I don’t write a whole lot. I prefer to just post sketches of what I have been up to, but I lost my sketchbook in all the chaos and until/if it’s back all I’ve got is this photo that my friend Abhi took while I was sketching at the Artwallah Festival.

Basically, I was busy organizing the festival after party, which took place at a really cool venue called Soul Folks in downtown Los Angeles. In addition to this, I knocked out a set of backgrounds for a short piece that my friends from the Post Natyam Collective are working on, and squeezed in time for my personal animated short as well as that whole full time job thing.

It all culminated in this weekend at the JACCC which is where Artwallah took place this year. Met all kinds of amazing people , including other volunteers, artists and many random people. Between all the work, I managed to check out outdoor acts like Micro Pixie, Vidya Quartet, Himalayan Project, My Pet Dragon, Falu. I was too hyper to sit still enough for the films and workshops. I met Ela Shah and her husband a few days before. Her beautiful mobiles were in our visual art gallery. I watched the first half of the evening show which was amazing, then I had to run off and finish setting up for the after party.

We were lucky enough to have a huge lineup of performers who came and partied with us. In no particular order, DJ Ameet Mehta and his wife Lena, Lovely, Anand Subramanian, DJ Dithmar Rualo, Ananda Sen, DJ Nitin Mukul, Himalayan Project, Shalini Rehil, Tanza Dancers and Jason Joseph. I was very busy running all over the party working, so if I missed anyone, let me know! Anyway, these amazing performers kept it all going till 5am. My heartfelt thanks to all of you!

This is a busy guy’s room. He hopes to draw more when he is less busy. It’ll happen.

Here are pen sketches I did in a little 4″x6″ sketchbook. It’s good for drawing at clubs or just around. I didn’t bother laying down any pencil lines, so they are kind of crude, directly drawn in pen. It’s fun to just scribble sometimes and create shapes out of that. All of them are from a late night party at a place called Soul Folks in downtown LA. I’ve been helping organize an after party which will take place there on June 24th, 2006. This is for a really fun South Asian art festival called Artwallah which will take place at the Japanese American Center on the same day. Be sure and check out the festival, then swing on over to the after party and say hello! Buy your tickets here!

The last sketch is from a place in Santa Monica that makes crepes. Good stuff.

Checked out a performance of Six Characters in Search of an Author over at UCLA. My talented friend Meena was one of the actors. It was a lot of fun watching this really fun group play the scene in so many different ways, expanding and revealing more about each character as they went on. The shifts in emotions as the story progressed were really well done too. It’s interesting to see that in a play where everything is created and performed in one go as opposed to a film. Here are some sketches.

Checked out a really fun Mexican folk dance performance called World City featuring the Pacifico Dance Theatre and Mariachi Divas. I quickly sketched these during the hour of the performance, then inked them later.

A watercolor from the UCLA Reggae Festival.

Here’s a sketch from the UCLA Reggae Festival.