I reached Mussoorie by the end of March for a three month self-sponsored residency. This was intended to get away from the hot Baroda summer and experience the charm of a new place and its people. The result is a new series of works on paper using natural pigments with casein.
I would like to name this series as ‘Mussoorie miniatures’ though the paintings lack the intricate and detailed rendering of the miniature tradition; these are small-scale, very much like a miniature.
The new series reminded me of my earlier residencies at Kalabhavan, Santiniketan in 1995 and at Queen Arts Hall, Northumberland in the United Kingdom in 2002 where I did a series of works on paper which reflected the local experience.
Life in this beautiful small town seemed very normal and busy with locals and tourists milling around in the street. That was before the second wave of the covid and the movement restrictions. Whenever I stepped out exploring through the streets I was observing the life in and around Mussoorie and later when I got back in my makeshift studio the town and its architectural designs transformed into my pictorial space, unknowingly and unconsciously.

The colours in my palette for the ‘Mussoorie miniatures’ are consciously kept limited. When I walk up to the Woodstock school from the Mullingar hill on the right down, I could see only the sap greens of the dense woods and bright red and brown roofs of houses and other private and public buildings. Architectural designs are peculiar in the hills. The Trim Lodge where I am comfortably housed, offers me browns and greens from its architecture and vermilion and a few other related colours from its garden and colour white as bright sun light when I open my green doors in the morning. Damaru, the pet dog at the Trim Lodge, with his yellow ochre/brown coat and naughty indigo-blue eyes, also contributed to the colours of my Mussoorie Miniature palette
Abhimanue V.G.
3 June 2021