My Science School

In Stitches

There are huge machines in factories that sew most of our clothes and other items. But many people still enjoy sewing by hand or with their own sewing machines. One reason people like to sew their own clothes is because, that way, they can choose exactly what size, colour, and material they want. Some people like to sew special things for their homes, such as curtains or pillowcases. People also sew gifts for their friends or families.

Embroidery is a craft that is related to sewing. It is used mainly for decoration. A person who embroiders uses a special needle and coloured thread called embroidery thread to make different kinds of stitches on cloth. The stitches can form pictures or designs.

You may have a shirt or sweater with words or pictures on it that have been embroidered by a machine. But many craft-workers enjoy embroidering by hand because it is creative and it relaxes them.

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The Roots of Ringgold’s Art

When you think of a painting, what do you see in your mind? A piece of canvas, painted and framed, hanging on a wall? That is probably what most people would think of. But artist Faith Ringgold makes paintings and other works of art by using materials in new ways.

Ringgold started experimenting with fabric in 1972, when she was teaching art at a college in New York City, U.S.A. At that time, Ringgold was insisting that museums show art by African American women. Much of this art was made of beads and fabric. Faith Ringgold encouraged her students to use beads and fabric in their art. So why, asked a student, did Ringgold always use canvas and paint in her own work?

The question made Ringgold wonder, too. After all, the women in her family had worked with fabric for almost 100 years. Her mother made a living by sewing and had taught Ringgold how to use a sewing machine.

But how could Ringgold mix fabric and painting? On a visit overseas, she discovered a way - tankas. These are cloth frames that Tibetans use for sacred paintings. Faith started framing her own paintings with tankas.

Next, Ringgold began making cloth sculptures. They looked like African masks. One such sculpture - Mrs. Jones and Family - shows Faith, her mother, Willi, her brother, Andrew, and her sister, Barbara, with their mouths wide open. The open mouths stand for the tradition of storytelling in Faith’s family.

Ringgold used quilting in her paintings in 1986. She used an African design - squares of four triangles - to make a quilted border around her painting Groovin’ High. She even quilted large squares onto the painted canvas.

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The first settlers in America, called colonists, had no factories or shops, and many communities had no craft-workers either. People had to build their own houses, grow their own food, and make their own clothes.

To make clothes, colonists had to do more than just cut out cloth and sew it together. First, they had to grow flax for linen and raise sheep for wool. Next, they had to spin the fibres into thread or yarn. Often they coloured it in dyes made from boiled plants. Then they wove or knitted it into cloth.

When the clothes the colonists had made became ragged, they didn’t throw them away. They found other ways to use them. Some cloth was cut into patches and then pieced together to make blankets called patchwork quilts. The craft of quilt-making is still popular today.

A quilt is a kind of fabric sandwich. The top and bottom layers are cloth. The filling is made of raw cotton or some other soft material.

Today, quilters sew the layers together with tiny stitches. The top and bottom layers can be made out of many coloured patches. Sometimes the stitches form designs like diamonds, leaves, or stars over the patches.

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Carle’s Collage Creatures

They have pictures made with colourful scraps of painted tissue papers, which he paints himself. The caterpillar in The Very Hungry Caterpillar is a collage.

To make the very hungry caterpillar, first Carle made a drawing of the caterpillar. He placed that drawing on top of a piece of red tissue paper and cut along the outline of the face. He put glue on the back of the tissue face and stuck it to a white board. One by one, Carle cut out the other parts of the caterpillar and added them to the red face. Then he drew details, such as hairs, with crayon.

In 1929, Eric Carle was born to German parents in Syracuse, New York, U.S.A. As a small child, Eric took many walks with his father. They often stopped to look under rocks and dead leaves. There they discovered tiny creatures, such as insects, spiders, and worms. Eric Carle’s love of nature began with these walks.

Eric went to kindergarten in Syracuse. He enjoyed experimenting with the fat brushes and bright paints in his art class. Eric’s teacher saw that he had talent. She urged his mother to encourage his drawing. But he learned more about animals and art outside school than inside.

As an older student, Eric was living in Stuttgart, Germany. On summer visits to farms, Eric milked cows and watched bees. While in the city, he visited his Uncle August, a storyteller, who inspired the young Eric. Eric Carle went on to make up his own stories with the collage creatures that delight children and adults today.

Paper Folding

Have you ever made a paper aeroplane? If you have, you have enjoyed the most recent and popular addition to the old craft of paper folding. This craft is called origami.

Originally, the Japanese invented about 100 origami figures. Most are natural forms, such as birds, frogs, and fish. One form of origami, with shapes all its own, is called noshi. These are pleated paper decorations that Japanese people attach to gifts. The Japanese like to use squares of paper for making origami figures. The squares range from 15 to 25 centimetres in size. They also use a special paper called washi.

Papermaking families in Japan still make washi by hand. To make washi, they first mix a glue-like liquid with bark, cotton, linen, or tree fibres and stir the mixture into a mush called pulp.

Next, they dip a special screen into the pulp and drain out most of the liquid. Then, they place the wet sheets on a flat surface to dry. The Japanese use the washi for umbrellas, kites, and origami.

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Getting Crafty

To do all the crafts, you will need lots of materials. Some things you will need for only one project. But other things you will use again and again.

It is a good idea to collect the materials and keep them in a large cardboard box. Then you will have the materials you need to work with.

Where will you find your materials? You may have to buy some at a craft shop. But you can start your collecting at home and outside. Remember to get permission before you take something for your collection. And be careful when handling sharp objects.

Craft materials to collect

• Rubber bands • tracing paper • bowls of different sizes • cardboard • clear tape • crayons • glue • flowers • leaves • food colouring • paper and card in different colours and weights • magazines • felt-tipped pens • masking tape • newspaper • open-weave canvas • pencils • pieces of cloth • a ruler • scissors • streamers • string • tissue paper • greaseproof paper • embroidery hoop • embroidery needle • embroidery thread.

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Most crafts are activities that have been done for a very long time. Some crafts developed in different parts of the world at the same time. For example, people in different parts of the world carved designs onto their wooden boats. Hundreds of years ago, a group of people called the Maori were skilled woodcarvers as well as good sailors. They sailed from islands in northeast Polynesia to what is now New Zealand in canoes decorated with beautiful woodcarvings.

Thousands of miles away, in northern Europe, Viking sailors decorated the prow, or front, of their ships with woodcarvings called figureheads. The tradition of figureheads continued in Western Europe, North America, and South America as long as large wooden ships sailed the seas.

Other crafts were important in different places. One such craft is kite-making. Almost two thousand years ago, Chinese generals used paper kites to signal their troops in battle.

Today, Japanese paint warriors on their kites and wage “war” in the air at kite festivals. They also celebrate Boys’ Day on May 5 by flying kite-like windsocks. These paper flags are shaped and painted like carp - fish that stand for strength, courage, and determination in Japan.

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When it comes to art, what you see is not always what you get. An art technique known as trompe l'oeil uses realistic imagery to create an optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions.

Trompe l'oeil was widely popular during the Renaissance, the technique was often employed to murals and frescoes on church ceilings. The fresco painting on the ceiling of the Church of Saint Ignazio in Rome, created by Andrea Pozzo during 1691-1694, is one classic example. A semi-circular roof is transformed into a fantastic picture of the heavens, in which Saint Ignatius ascends into paradise.

The term trompe l'oeil (meaning trick of the eye in French) was first used by artist Louis-Leopold Boilly as a title of his painting in Paris in 1800. It later gained currency throughout Europe. The technique was usually used to create the impression of a bigger space.

Artists Vittorio Carpaccio and Jacopo de Barbari took the technique further. They added small trompe l'oeil details to their paintings such as a curtain that appears to partly conceal the painting, or a person might appear to be climbing out of the painting altogether.

Putting things in perspective

A lesser-known art technique known as anamorphosis, is an offshoot of the trompe l'oeil technique. In anamorphosis, a deformed image appears in its true shape when viewed in an unconventional way. There are two types of anamorphosis images:

** Oblique - These images need to be viewed from a position that is very far from the usual positions from where we normally expect images to be looked at

** Catoptric - The image must be seen reflected in a distorting mirror. The Hungarian artist István Orosz has produced some beautiful examples of these

How does it work?

We tend to believe something is real if we see it in front of us. However, seeing is not a direct perception of reality. What we see is the result of our brains constantly interpreting and giving structure to the raw visual input from our eyes. Artists use this knowledge to create optical illusions in the tromp l'oeil paintings.

 

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Raja Ravi Varma was a celebrated Indian painter and artist. He is considered among the greatest painters in the history of Indian art. His works are one of the best examples of the fusion of European academic art with a purely Indian sensibility and iconography. Additionally, he was notable for making affordable lithographs of his paintings available to the public, which greatly enhanced his reach and influence as a painter and public figure. His lithographs increased the involvement of common people with fine arts and defined artistic tastes among common people. Furthermore, his religious depictions of Hindu deities and works from Indian epic poetry and Puranas have received profound acclaim.

Varma was patronised by Ayilyam Thirunal, the next Maharaja of Travancore and began formal training thereafter. He learned the basics of painting in Madurai. Later, he was trained in water painting by Rama Swami Naidu and in oil painting by Dutch portraitist Theodor Jenson.

The British administrator Edgar Thurston was significant in promoting the careers of Varma and his brother. Varma received widespread acclaim after he won an award for an exhibition of his paintings at Vienna in 1873. Varma's paintings were also sent to the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 and he was awarded three gold medals.[8] He travelled throughout India in search of subjects. He often modelled Hindu Goddesses or Indian women, whom he considered beautiful. Ravi Varma is particularly noted for his paintings depicting episodes from the story of Dushyanta and Shakuntala, and Nala and Damayanti, from the Mahabharata. Ravi Varma's representation of mythological characters has become a part of the Indian imagination of the epics. He is often criticized for being too showy and sentimental in his style but his work remains very popular in India. Many of his fabulous paintings are housed at Laxmi Vilas Palace, Vadodara.

 

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Jamini Roy was an Indian painter. He was honoured with the State award of Padma Bhushan in 1955. He was one of the most famous pupils of Abanindranath Tagore, whose artistic originality and contribution to the emergence of art in India remains questionable.

Jamini Roy was born in the year 1887 at Beliatore village in the Bankura district of West Bengal. Roy was born into an affluent family of land-owners. His father, Ramataran Roy, resigned from his government services to pursue his interest in art. In the year 1903, when he was only 16 years old, Jamini Roy left his village and made it all the way to Calcutta (now Kolkata) to enroll himself at the Government College of Art. There, he received education under Abanindranath Tagore, famous for his valuable contribution in the field of modern art. Tagore was the vice principal of the college and trained Roy as per the prevailing academic tradition. Roy finished his education in 1908 and was given a Diploma in Fine Arts. Roy was true to the art that he learned and started painting in accordance with the Western classical style. But he straightaway realized that his heart belonged to some other form of art. 

Jamini Roy’s paintings that belong to the early 1920’s reflect the influences of the Bengal School of art. Initially, he came up with some excellent paintings that marked his entry into the Post-Impressionist genre of landscapes and portraits. Later in his career, several of his many paintings were based on the everyday life of rural Bengal. Then, there were numerous ones revolving around religious themes like Ramayana, Radha-Krishna, Jesus Christ, etc. Jamini Roy also painted scenes from the lives of the aboriginals called Santhals. Throughout his works, his brush strokes were largely bold and sweeping. Around mid-1930s, Jamini Roy moved away from the conventional practice of painting on canvases and started painting on materials like cloth, mats and even wood coated with lime. He also started experimenting with natural colors and pigments derived from mud, chalk powder and flowers instead of European paints.

 

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The Victoria Memorial Hall is proud to present this major exhibition of paintings of the great master Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), the foundational figure of the Bengal school of Art, and widely hailed as the 'Father of Modern Indian Art'. Curated by Professor Ratan Parimoo, the Director of Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Museum of Indology and N. C. Mehta Gallery, Ahmedabad, and a leading expert of Tagore paintings, this exhibition - put together painstakingly from the combined collections of the Victoria Memorial Hall and Rabindra Bharati society - includes representative samples from Abanindranath's entire oeuvre, showcasing not only iconic works like Bharatmata and The Passing of Shah Jahan, but also works from his celebrated series of Krishna Lila, the Mangal Kavyas, The Arabian Nights, and his playful takes on Masks. Many of the works included in this exhibition will be on view to the public for the first time.

Abanindranath Tagore was born in Jorasanko, Calcutta, British India, to Gunendranath Tagore and Saudamini Tagore. His grandfather was Girindranath Tagore, the second son of "Prince" Dwarkanath Tagore. He was a member of the distinguished Tagore family, and a nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. His grandfather and his elder brother, Gaganendranath Tagore, were also artists.

Tagore learned art when studying at Sanskrit College, Kolkata in the 1880s.

In 1890, around the age of twenty years, Abanindranath attended the Calcutta School of Art where he learnt to use pastels from O. Ghilardi, and oil painting from C. Palmer, European painters who taught in that institution.

In 1889, he married Suhasini Devi, daughter of Bhujagendra Bhusan Chatterjee, a descendant of Prasanna Coomar Tagore. At this time he left the Sanskrit College after nine years of study and studied English as a special student at St. Xavier's College, which he attended for about a year and a half.

He had a sister, Sunayani Devi.

 

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The original Constitution of India was handwritten by Prem Behari Narain Raizada in a flowing italic style with beautiful calligraphy. The Constitution was published in Dehradun and photolithographed by the Survey of India.



The original copies of the Indian Constitution were written in Hindi and English. Each member of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Constitution, signed two copies of the constitution, one in Hindi and the other in English.

There are a total of 117,369 words in the English version of the Constitution of India which contains 444 articles in 22 parts, 12 schedules and 115 amendments.



With so much of writing, the Indian Constitution is the longest of any sovereign country in the world. In its current form, it has a Preamble, 22 parts with 448 articles, 12 schedules, 5 appendices and 115 amendments. Both the versions of the Constitution, Hindi and English, were handwritten. It is the longest handwritten constitution of any country on earth.

 

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The original Constitution of India, adopted on 26 January 1950, was not a printed document. It was entirely handcrafted by the artists of Shantiniketan under the guidance of Acharya Nandalal Bose, with the calligraphy texts done by Prem Behari Narain Raizada in Delhi. This document is now preserved in a special helium-filled case in the library of the Parliament of India. In many ways, the original handcrafted Constitution represents one of the triumphs of Shantiniketan and Kala Bhavan.

At the beginning of each part of the Constitution, Nandalal Bose has depicted a phase or scene from India's national experience and history. The artwork and illustrations (22 in all), rendered largely in the miniature style, represent vignettes from the different periods of the history of the Indian subcontinent, ranging from Mohenjodaro in the Indus Valley, the Vedic period, the Gupta and Maurya empires and the Mughal era to the national freedom movement. By doing so, Nandalal Bose has taken us through a veritable pictorial journey across 4000 years of rich history, tradition and culture of the Indian subcontinent.



The Vedic period is represented by a scene of gurukula (forest hermitage school) and the epic period by images from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Then there are depictions of the lives of the Buddha and Mahavira, followed by scenes from the courts of Ashoka and Vikramaditya. There is a beautiful line drawing of the Nataraja from the Chola bronze tradition.

 

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Internationally-acclaimed Gond artist Bhajju Shyam has also been honoured with a Padma Shri. Mr. Shyam is famous for depicting Europe in his Gond paintings. Born in a poor tribal family, he worked as a night watchman and electrician to support family before becoming a professional artist. His The London Jungle Book sold 30,000 copies and has been published in five foreign languages.

Kerala’s medical messiah for the terminally ill, M R Rajagopal, is among the awardees. Rajagopal has specialised in pain relief care for neo natal cases.

Maharashtra’s Murlikant Petkar, India’s first para- Olympic gold medalist, who lost his arm in 1965 Indo-Pak war, is another winner.

Tamil Nadu’s Rajagopalan Vasudevan, known as the plastic road-maker of India, developed a patented and innovative method to reuse plastic waste to construct roads, has also been given the Padma Shri.

 

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She was young and super talented but we lost her when she is just 28 due to unknown reasons. Late artist Amrita Sher Gil was about to attend her first solo show in Lahore but went into a coma and left her legacy behind which went onto becoming world famous! Born in 1913 in Budapest, Hungary, her paintings are known worldwide. Often called India's Frida Kahlo for aesthetically blending traditional and Western art forms, Amrita was one of the most famous painters of India.

Her artwork may have mostly depicted Western style and culture during the initial stages of her career, but she gradually rediscovered herself by depicting Indian subjects using traditional methods. She even travelled to different parts of India, France and Turkey, which inspired her techniques. 

Her works in India, which were after her wedding, Amrita's paintings had a tremendous impact on Indian art. Many of her works were influenced by the works of Rabindranath Tagore and Abanindranath Tagore. Some of the best works of her time include ‘Siesta’, ‘Village Scene’ and ‘In the Ladies' Enclosure’, which represented the poor state of the unprivileged and women in the country. In 1941, she moved to Lahore (before independence), where art was being appreciated at that time. There she came up with ‘The Bride’, ‘Tahitian’, ‘Red Brick House’ and ‘Hill Scene’.

 

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