Abhay's pictures!

Abhay’s passion for drawing and colouring has its highs and lows. In fact, not very long ago, I had lamented over Abhay’s waning enthusiasm for drawing only to have him take a cue and resume his hobby with a renewed interest and shift in focus. So far, each of Abhay’s pictures can be catalogued in terms of the time, place and the prevailing phase of his creative curve! From houses to scenery to birthday parties, Abhay has drawn inspiration from various sources. So there was a time when Abhay Inc. (as he was drawing pictures on a mass scale!) was into churning out pictures exclusively of birthday cakes and later diversified into farm houses (or rather Abhay’s vision of a farm house) and eventually settled for pictures of automobiles! Off late Abhay seems to have switched allegiance from automobiles to mythological or superhuman characters. So instead of drawings of buses, cars trucks and ships, Abhay assiduously turns out sketches of Hindu Gods like Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva or mythological characters inspired from the cover pages of Amarchitra Katha books or super hero characters. So if you want to catch Vishnu holding a club with Brahma and Shiva looking on.....you'll find it in Abhay’s pictures! :-)

 

Amused by his latest inspiration, today I picked out  “Willy's Pictures” by our favorite author Anthony Browne from the British Library.  This book is centered around an anthropomorphic monkey named Willy whom we met in "Willy, the Dreamer", also by the same author-illustrator. Well…you must have guessed by now that Willy is an artist and each of his paintings has a story to tell. As you flip through the pages that adorn the smartly captioned paintings, you see Willy and his friends in all of them. In fact all of the paintings are parodies of famous works of legends like Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, Frieda Kahlo, Vermeer, etc. I found the author’s version of “The Arnolfini marriage” by Jan Van Eyke downright funny! Of course nothing beats Willy’s version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” wherein his friend Buster Nose poses in Mona Lisa garb sporting her “Mysterious Smile”! The book  ends with a fold out page with original pictures that can double up as a find and seek or spot the differences activity for your little one as he or she can attempt  to match the original works with Willy’s versions and interpretations. Though not your average run of the mill picture book, “Willy Pictures” is a great way to introduce your little one and get acquainted yourself with world famous works of art. Abhay was particularly fascinated by “The Turkish Bath” by Jean Auguste and Dominique Ingres and Willy’s version titled “At the Swimming Pool” where Willy is shown to have entered the wrong changing room! Well…..I only hope he doesn’t reproduce the same in his pictures!:-)