Steps, New Delhi India, 38

day 5: a day (or more) of rest
Where The Mind Is Without Fear
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up in to fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake
Written by Rabindranath Tagore before India's independence, this poem represents Tagore's idyllic dream of the new, awakened India.


day 4: the finished painting
Even after I tried to convince myself that the painting was finished, I knew it wasn't really finished. My color harmonies were too forced and uncertain. So, I played around with the color temperatures until something clicked: a night scene. (The hint of stars also serves to remind us what this structure is all about.) 

Also, almost immediately after the night-scene idea emerged, I thought of an album cover I had loved from back-in-the-day. The way our brain encodes and stores certain images, sounds, smells, etc, is so wondrous! 

This painting is for sale in my online store (with more photos too): https://www.etsy.com/listing/188710968

STEPS,  8x10" original oil painting by puci

The first "finished" painting

The window & night-scene image from an old album cover

  

day 3: creating the pre-painting composition (using Adobe Photoshop)
I cropped closer-in to omit the "noise" beyond, and added another visible step.

My composition using Photoshop

day 2: capturing the selected image
We're at the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, India.

The Jantar Mantar is a collection of 13 architectural astronomical instruments, built around 1724 by Maharaji Sawai Jai Singh ll. The primary purpose was to predict the times & movements of the sun, moon and planets. (And I'm thinking that the whimsical & wondrous structural shapes were purposeful as well.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jantar_Mantar,_Delhi

The image as scene from Google Maps, Street Views

day 1: planning the destination
I want to portray another, more wondrous, view of India.