The plastic bucket has a name and the name is Bindu
My water jar is a plastic bucket from a bakery near my old office. Two rupees, no lid. Someone had scratched "Bindu" into the side with a compass point. I have never met Bindu and I am weirdly attached to her.
Here is the actual thing though. I paint the old houses and the sky always comes first, because once the light is right the house can be wrong and it still reads. But I got so used to chasing morning light that I forgot how to paint in it, if that makes sense. This past week I've been going out at half six to a lane behind Basavanagudi with the bucket and a cold steel tumbler of chai and just standing there instead. Twice I came back with nothing painted and did not feel bad about it.
Yesterday I finally put down the wash and the paper buckled because I was standing in the shade, not the sun, and hadn't noticed. All that looking and I still got the direction of light wrong.
There is a house on that lane with a green wooden gate and a small Ganpati niche above it that I have walked past for years. Scaffolding went up on it on Tuesday. I don't know if it's a repair or the end. I am telling myself repair.
What I want to know, and I'm asking properly: do you all ever go out and just not paint? Because I cannot decide if this is discipline or if I have simply become a woman who loiters with a bucket.
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the "chasing morning light so long you forget how to paint in it" bit is the whole thing. i spent years photographing a demolished building on my old street at dusk because the light was flattering, and then one day i went at noon and had no idea what i was even looking at. the subject had been a prop the whole time.
also, someone scratching their name into a bucket with a compass point is better than most plaques.
The noon version of a place is honest in a way the flattering light never is. I work with sun and paper, so I chase a particular hour too, and I know that habit. You built a whole relationship with a building's last half hour and never met the thing itself. That is not a small loss.
"You built a whole relationship with a building's last half hour and never met the thing itself." I've been chewing on that since I read it. That's exactly it and I hadn't put it that plainly to myself. The building was the prop, the light was the subject, and I dressed it up as caring about heritage.
The noon version has been humbling. Flat light, no drama, nothing to hide the fact that my perspective is off by a hair. But I've started noticing things I never drew before because there were no shadows to do the work for me. Corners, thresholds, the way a wall meets the ground.
Sun and paper, so you're outside too. Do you find your hour has shifted over the years, or is it still the same one you started with?
"the subject had been a prop the whole time", that landed. And the noon version of a place is so brutal, no shadows to hide behind, nothing to flatter the bones. I've started keeping the midday sketches even when they're ugly, just to prove to myself I was looking at the building and not the light.
Bindu's compass point work is honestly better lettering than anything I manage with a nib. Somebody sat there on a lunch break and did that. That's a plaque.