Postcards from India! 🎨 (5 watercolours)

There wasn’t much opportunity to paint while I was in India because it was SO darn hot! The average daily temperature was 37°C and, according to my weather app, the humidity made it feel like 41°! Even at night, just opening the door to the outside felt like opening the door into a sauna.

However, in half an hour here and there, either early morning or at dusk, I did manage to sit and sweat just long enough to do a few small watercolour sketches.

As I was there on retreat (read more about that here) and travelling light, I wasn’t really expecting to do any ‘work’ as such. However, I did take a minimal art kit which took up very little space in my luggage. This consisted of:

1 tiny watercolour set
1 pad of watercolour postcards
1 waterbrush (a brush with a built-in water reservoir)
1 grey ink pen

None of the paintings I made will win any prizes! They were not intended to be finished paintings for display or sale, or indeed any kind of public ‘judgement’.

That REALLY wasn’t the point.

I made them with no expectations. They were simply a way to sit for a while, be totally present, and observe the light, colours and shapes around me. Just visual 'notes'; all made in short windows of time, in and around the centre, mostly from my balcony.

As I often tell my students; you can take thousand photos and forget the details in no time at all, yet if you spend a few minutes making a sketch, it will be embedded in your mind for years to come. It’s one of the magical things about how our brain's work.

These little tiny paintings are of little value to anyone else, but to me they are priceless personal treasures that have already served to etch my time in India into my memory.

Anyway, now I'm sharing them here with you;