Festival: Stage 6

Inspired by INDIA, this drawing is...exuberant, to say the least. I'm not sure the web log format can handle the magnitude of the entire image. Here are some bite-sized crops. I'll see how I feel about it, later.

It was pretty FUN.

Festival: Stage 5

Festival: Stage 4

Festival: Stage 3

Festival: Stage 2

Festival: Stage 1

WHAT I FOUND in India: Festival

THANK YOU, India

click to enlarge

I've been writing about India in my head for weeks. It is daunting to try to pick up where I left off, yet engage this experience of traveling in India in my work, my life in Savannah.

I've wanted to write here, where I left off. Daunted, though, I perused the web logs of my friends and let the thoughts percolate. [Also - I've been really really busy since I got home so time to write was not in abundance.]

Recently, I became confident that the experiences in India will inform my work naturally, whether I write volumes of travelogue and analysis or not.

While drawing for a commissioned work, I suddenly veered from my drafting table into my sketchbook with rough pencil, then pen, then colored pencil, then watercolor - just a bit. I needed to MAKE SOMETHING to express my gratitude, and to begin to express just a bit of the beauty I saw in India, some of which I was able to capture in photographs.

I MISSED Making Things. My solace was "Making" Photographs but it wasn't quite enough. It's nice to be back at my desk.

I THOUGHT I had traveled enough...but India made my head spin - and I liked it.

I LOVED the wonderful host families who cared for me as their own daughter. Almost everything seemed foreign to us. So the genuine love our hosts showed us reached through all that was foreign to the human heart, cut from the same mold, the real conduit for cross-cultural exchange.

So, THANK YOU Mr. & Mrs. Achar, Kusuma Pai & family, Zubi, Fakhru & the Kunil families, Mr. & Mrs. Rastogi, the Jagadish family, the Sridhar family, the Nagendra family, G.N. Prakash & Vijaya - and all others whose names I've woven into the strands of the sandalwood garland I treasure from our welcome in Mangalore by Captain Pais, Eulalia and the outgoing GSE team.

This is Savannah, in India

Our Rotary Group will be giving some unique gifts to our hosts, including the Savannah Postcards 5-pack and Mini-books of This is Savannah Vol. 1.

Georgia to Karnataka

Almost as soon as I set them, my goals for New Drawings began to evaporate. Enter: Rotary Group Study Exchange. After four months of preparation, from application/interviews to final departure, it's been an enlivening experience to be selected for the District 6920 GSE team this year to travel to INDIA for five weeks.

On Sunday, I fly with three teammates/friends and our group leader from Savannah, Georgia to Mangalore, India - via Dubai and New York City.

Developing a Presentation to show Rotarians and others in India about where we live and who we are was an element of our preparation. My curiosity about India led me, first, to maps. I had been gathering maps about various aspects of India, so I volunteered to begin designing the Presentation with a series of macro-scale demographic comparison maps. A few came to fruition in our final presentation and other comparisons followed.

So I'll be seeing and experiencing some amazing things in Karnataka, India. As we are able to find time and internet access in our full and exciting schedule, we'll be posting photos to our group web log HERE.