The Venice of the East: Mapping a surreal place

Lake City is a three meters long leporello drawing I made during a two months long stay in the city of Udaipur in Rajasthan, India. Udaipur, also called Lake City and known as the “Venice of the East”, is considered one of the most beautiful cities of India. It is a fairytale city full of gorgeous palaces, a labyrinth of lakes and bridges and millions of intricate alleyways leading to mysterious temples. For me it was a wonderland I loved to explore, mostly with my bike.

My illustrated book, Lake City, was created while exploring and directly drawn in the streets of Udaipur over many, many hours. It is a multi-spatial tour through the city and documents things seen, experienced, memorized and fantasized in this surreal city. For those who don’t know Udaipur, the drawing might appear to depict a completely imaginary place, but the drawing is an attempt to capture the overwhelmingly surreal nature and magical beauty of a city with its people, gods and animals.

My drawing blurs the line between imagination and reality, reproducing the feeling one gets while strolling through Udaipur. Palaces swimming on lakes, goddesses showing their tongues, women floating on the water riding on swans and horses disguised as baby elephants – all these are images found in Udaipur and have become part of my fantastical portrait of the spirit of the city.

Below you can read some of the stories behind the drawings of the book:

The lakes

Gangaur Ghat is the main ghat (a square with steps leading down to the water) of Udaipur.
It is in the heart of the city and one of my favourite places to draw, and in this scene you can see me sitting and drawing myself in the arcades on the left (you can spot my bike in another arcade). Gangaur Ghat is a popular meeting place for people to have a cup of chai and enjoy the beautiful view across Lake Pichola. Being a foreigner everybody wanted to talk to me and I had lots of fun encounters there – but sometimes I had to wear my earphones in order to be able to draw without being interrupted every five minutes, otherwise I think I would still be sitting there trying to finish my drawing.

The palaces

Udaipur is famous for its beautiful white palaces on the waterfront and some even floating in the middle of the lakes. The palaces in my drawing are inspired by these palaces but also consist of a patchwork of different architectural details and other things and scenes found in the city. This palace, for example, contains shrines with different deities, the door of the blue house mentioned below in the story about the prince, and the portrait of a lovely woman from the old town whose child I drew on the street and who invited me into her kitchen to have a cup of chai with her.

The goddess riding on the swan is an image I found in a small temple hidden near Hathipol Road. I remember sitting there and writing in my sketchbook for some time, when the temple guardian emerged, came up to me and told me the most beautiful words I had ever heard in a house of god: “The temple is a centre of peace and pleasure. You can sit here in peace and think of the god you believe in“.

The prince

During one of my bike tours through the old town one day, I discovered a very beautiful blue house and stopped to marvel at it. The owner of the house, Prem, invited me inside for some tea and took me to a ritual at one of the neighbour‘s house. That family worshipped a long gone Udaipur prince, Sagas Ji (whose eternally surprised glance you meet in the little shrine next to the black door), like a god in a little shrine next to the entrance of their house, and in turn Sagas Ji would protect their house and family.

While the sun was slowly setting, we, together with the children from the neighbourhood, witnessed the puja, a ritual of worship involving lots of flowers, ringing bells, rose water, cow pee and water from the Ganges.

The solar observatory

The solar observatory, lonely like an abandoned island in the middle of Fateh Sagar Lake, is one of the most spectacular views. One of my most beautiful memories is of one night when I was on my way back from a wedding in the hills. I was riding a motorbike through the pitch black forest and then all of a sudden emerged between the two lakes into a dreamlike scenery of breathtaking beauty and great peace. There was nothing under the dark sky but stars and silence and the white solar observatory in the middle of the black lake, other-worldly like a spaceship floating in its own universe.

The bridge and the temple

Udaipur foot bridge across Lake Pichola connects the old town with Ambamata district. Near the bridge you find Jagdish Temple, the biggest and busiest temple in Udaipur. I used to go there to draw or write quite often, meeting all kinds of people there – for example Neha, a beautiful, dolled-up girl who had come all the way from Jaipur to consult the goddess Ma Durga about her love life and who then after visiting Ma Durga’s shrine also sought some advice from me; a funny old man who snatched my notebook from my hands and checked it in the same manner an inspector would check the validity of a bus ticket, approving my indecipherable with a sharp nod); and a very friendly policeman who, after he had done his prayer in full uniform except his shoes, gave some bills to a beggar and some candy to me.

Udaipur City Palace

This part of the drawing depicts the famous city palace where once the Maharanas of Mewar lived. It is an enormous and fascinating palace build and expanded over a period of almost 400 years, and I spent many days drawing it and exploring it. My favourite detail of this part is the horse with the elephant trunk – the Maharanas used to dress their horses with artificial elephant trunks in war so the elephants of their enemies would believe them to be baby elephants and would not attack them.

You can order Lake City here in my shop

Circular time. A tale from the country of dust and magic

In India, particularly in Rajasthan, the country of dust and magic, you find many miniature paintings of hands and feet with objects painted on them. Sometimes they even have faces. They inspired me for this illustration for a book about yoga ("Was ist Yoga") with Kirstin Breitenfellner.

The most beautiful of these magical hands and feet I found in Udaipur, where I lived some time three years ago, and where I wrote this story – It’s the first part of a text about a magical night in the old town.

CIRCULAR TIME

There were times when I could not tell apart the homes of gods from the homes of humans.

I often went by bike to the artist supply store on the other side of the city, taking the way right through the marvellous old town. I always took a different rout, getting lost in the labyrinth of streets: time was endless back then. One evening, I was cycling back home, when all of a sudden, between houses of the color of sand and clay, there was this bright blue, almost glowing house. I had to stop to look at it. With its big, glowing blue facade it looked so foreign, so different from all other houses that I was sure such an enchanting house must have been built for some deity:

Garlands of last season‘s dried up marigold hang from the painted gate, on which you see paintings of princes riding on elephants and horses. To the right and the left of the gate, in such perfect symmetry as if they were part of the architecture, there are two sand colored street dogs, as if they were guarding the entrance in their sleep.

As I stand there, the house owner appears from somewhere, and he is as curious about me as I am about the house.

I learn it is not a god’s house. But it is a private temple, like all Indian houses – a place where humans and gods coexist. I tell him how fascinated I am with his beautiful house, and he invites me in for some chai in the courtyard, which is just as blue and glowing as the facade.

The color of that glowing house, some kind of electric baby blue, contrasts satisfyingly (like lemon and sugar maybe), with the creamy rose-colored sari of the woman who all of a sudden appears in the atrium with two cups of chai, and who is introduced to me as “aunty” – a shy, sinewy woman with dark skin and bright eyes who does not speak English.

Prem, my host, is a chubby man, friendly and talkative, happy in his magic magic world full of little miracles and self-fulfilling prophecies: an unmysterious man surrounded by mystery, all answer surrounded by questions.

While we are sitting in the doorway sipping chai, he explains me all the magical details of his house, mysterious emblems whose sense he reveals to me with the pride of a real magician (while aunty frequently nods in agreement), including aunty’s many toe rings, which, she explains, he translates, indicate her status of a married woman.

And this sign here for example, half Sanskrit, half Chinese, is to repel the evil eyes that fly around in this city like black butterflies. The painting of the elephant carrying a Maharaja means good luck, while the horse on the opposite door is a symbol of power. The marigolds are a leftover from Diwali, the festival of lights, the larder is not only a food storage room, but also serving as a shrine, a chamber of rice and magic, where the paraphernalia of Ganesh, the elephant god (every household has a different god), are stored. Widows mean bad luck, he tells me, if you meet one on the street, turn around and go back home before you get on your way again. That’s why they dress in white, so you recognise them. The same applies to the milk man. The white of the widow, the white of the milk, bad luck.

But let’s talk about brides now: The dried lemon and chilli hanging from the door frame are waiting to be touched by the sword of the groom, chosen for his bride by an astrologer who makes sure the birth charts of the two are compatible. A young and shy groom who will come riding on a decorated white horse with a plastic sword to enter the house for the first time to take his bride – like Prem dreams of doing one day, in another house, another time…

The Illustration is available as a Super Fine Art Print here.