Unfortunately for my dad, my preferred medium was blue ballpoint pen on the pages of his National Geographic magazines. Once I could walk I drew faces and places on the walls of our home with HB pencils. A few years later, we covered our walls with wallpaper. I was in kindergarten at Our Lady of Perpetual Succour (OLPS) School at the time, and too young to comprehend the loss of my earliest art wo
rks. Life was the present moment, and what was to come. We didn’t have digital cameras back in the 1980S to keep records of these things. But I vividly remember some of the faces that I drew. The wallpaper in our living room had a floral design. So I started painting the flowers with watercolours. Some flowers were red, others yellow, and even blue. When I was in Grade 2, there was lots of talk of a drawing teacher who taught an art class every Sunday morning at AFAC School. AFAC was just down the road from OLPS, about half a mile from our home. My friend and classmate Nikhil Lobo, who died of leukaemia when we were only 16, encouraged me to enrol for these art classes, and spoke to my father about it. My only memory of this class is that my teacher discouraged me from drawing cartoons. He went on to state his reasons (which made no sense to me, obviously). Still, I continued going to his classes till Grade 4 and drawing realistic faces and objects. In Grade 5, I enrolled for art classes with Christabel D’souza. Christabel D’souza was a retired art teacher who started her career at OLPS School when it was a coeducation school. At some point they built a separate school for the girls, Saint Anthony's Girls High School, where Christabel taught till her retirement. Christabel taught me how to draw both cartoons and real life figures, even animals, flowers and still life. The time I spent drawing and painting in Christabel’s living room on Wednesday afternoons is one of my fondest childhood memories. Christabel lived on the second floor of Karibu Building on 12th Road in Chembur, Mumbai. About ten of us boys and girls sat in a circle on the floor. Some kids used oil pastel crayons, others watercolours, poster colours, and charcoal pencils. During this time I also appeared for the Elementary and Intermediate Drawing Exams. These are a couple of art exams that the Government conducts for students of Grades 7 and 8 respectively. They encourage you to enrol for these exams if you want to pursue art as a career. The exams happen over two or three days. The subjects include Still Life, Nature Drawing, Memory Drawing, Geometry, Design, and Lettering. Anthony Rumao, our drawing teacher in school, would conduct extra classes for students who were preparing for these exams. We stayed back three times a week after school in an empty classroom on the ground floor of our school, drawing… painting… just being kids. My parents shot down my desire to pursue a career in fine arts. And I found it difficult to make time for my art while I pursued a degree in Physics, or wrote software programs for a living after college. In 2002 I was fed up with my work and my lack of creative pursuits. So I switched over to a career in professional photography. Photography satiates my desire to create, but there’s always been that little gap that can only be filled by conventional forms of visual art. Over the years I found it very difficult to resume drawing and painting. But that was until I discovered sketching on a tablet with the help of a stylus. I don’t set out to draw a particular person, or form. I just let the previous stroke influence the next one and see who shows up on the page. My dream is to create characters and stories for cartoon films with Disney, Cartoon Network, and Pixar. When I have about 200 drawings, I want to put them in a book. I don’t know much about publishing and the costs of publishing. If you know anything in this regard, please lmk. I can use all the help I can get. What would be wonderful in the meantime is if you pledge to buy my book 🤗
