Bits n' Pieces

 ~Chanchal Bhattacharya, IV Semester                           

“Architecture is the art of how to waste space.”

  The first thing I did having joined the course was to tear off an old jeans and paint it with acrylic colours! There I was wondering what I was doing cutting and painting a pair of jeans.

Of course, I was clueless and what next was cover it up with Plaster of Paris and give it a form. I dirtied my hands, clothes the studio. I tried to make it look like a mushroom, and...Eureka!!!! That’s the first model I made that I could say was ‘Abstract Art’.

 “There are three forms of visual art: Painting is art to look at, sculpture is art you can walk around, and architecture is art you can walk through”

  Visual arts. What a subject. I could paint, throw colours, rub my hands clothes in them, paint on any texture I want, put any texture on the paint etc., but what really caught my attention was oil paints on glass. We were supposed to do an abstract art on a 30cm by 30cm piece of glass, wet a cartridge sheet and place it behind the glass and take the imprint before it got dried. I could see tons of imprints everywhere, and it was like, 'Wow, everyone here is an artist.' It was fun getting to know a technique like this. It was late, my cartridge sheet was stuck to the back of the glass as I was too engrossed and dazzled looking at others. In no mood to remove it using oil, I turned it over to cover it with paper and take it back home, and...’Wonderful’ was the first thing that came out of my mouth. The cartridge acted as a background to the painting I did and I could see a clear inverted picture through the 4mm thickness of the glass and I went gaga over it.

 “Architecture is music in space, as it were a frozen music”

  ‘Shipping off to Boston’, the music soundtrack of the movie ‘The Departed’

I had an opportunity to plug in my iPod and go boom! The exercise was to draw random lines to follow each and every minute detail, tune, pitch and voice for the first 20 seconds. I followed the piece of music several times, drawing different strokes as an ‘Abstract Polygraph’ machine would do. I scribbled on many A2 sheets and in the end I had a curved frame of crazy lines. I chose a small part out of the whole diagram, magnified it, studied the lines, their nature and came up with a 3D model for it. It reminded me of the Windows Media Player visualisation. I started relating my final 2D drawing with the visualisation and the next thing I saw was waste plastic glasses; a 100 CD set cover, a candle and a matchbox and in 30 minutes came the outcome- plastic glasses burnt inside a 100 CD set giving it the exact 3D shape for my 2D presentation. Reminds me of what Rohe once said - “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”

“Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.”

  Playing with cubes reminds me of Aldo, of how he used slits in the walls and played with light. The cubes exercise demanded the same with slits, forms, textures and fusion. But solid geometry never impressed me as much as curves did and the following exercise took me back to whatever I had studied since the first semester. Right from my first project of lines involving Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to the last model on music that I did and what I had in front of me became an Art Museum. I had always thought, 'Why is it that all paintings have straight boundaries on a flat surface.' Taking my inspiration from frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim museum, my previous music model turned into an Art museum with several floors each dedicated to picturise paintings having convex and concave surfaces. The reason was that back in Pondicherry I witnessed a show which showed Guernica on a huge moving opaque screen being witnessed from a long and short distance showing the terror of war depicted in the painting. There was my reason as to how a convex picture could draw one away from the painting and a concave picture could draw one close to it.

  In short whatever I have learnt in college till date has helped me all together in every design and art we do. It has been a roller coaster ride, from seeing a brick being laid to its expression on paper. Abstract Art appeals to me and I hope I can continue strong with it.

“The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.”