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

Travel sketchbooks: Capturing ephemeral countries

This is a portrait of my fellow artist Barbora. I met her in the North East of India, and for one month we shared a room in the jungle-covered hills of Meghalaya, where explored the fascinating culture of the Khasi together and became friends.

When I met her, I was immediately intrigued by her enthusiasm – she had just arrived from a long and complicated journey from Finland but instead of being exhausted, she seemed to burst with energy. Her eyes were beaming as she told us that she had, god knows how, managed to ride on an elephant on the way from Guwahati airport up to the hill, five hours on a bumpy dirt road, which was exhausting enough alone. 

I admired her way of seeing the world, her refreshing personality, which was a charming combination of straightforwardness and tenderness, and I was particularly fascinated by the instant and special connection she had with the Khasi, and I documented a part of her very special story in my book "Meghalaya".

I like to explore countries, cultures, and communities with my sketchbooks, but as much as they are travel books, they are also personal diaries. As much as I am interested in learning a lot about a culture and trying to tell stories about it, for me it is equally important to tell about the context in which I travel and tell about the things that happen in and around me: I am interested uniqueness of the moment. Sometimes I like to compare myself to a sponge, absorbing it all, and I also like to let myself carry away into all sorts of different directions - for example, my Meghalaya book is full of stories not only about Meghalaya, but also contains lots of stories about Assam, because that particular Meghalayan microcosmos I visited was inhabited by an Assamese storyteller whose beautiful stories for me became an important part of the experience. I like that sort of eclecticism because this is just how the world is, chaotic and marvelous. 

My travel sketchbook is not only about observations, but also about relationships, and a fellow traveler at some point becomes as much part of the place as a native – places express themselves through the people who live there, but also through the ones who travel through, and the story that develops between them, like the story of Barbora and Arrowstar, a young archer and soldier from the Khasi hills. 

I hold the pen in my hands, but what speaks in my sketchbooks is not only my voice, but the voice of many. I like it to be a place where everything can be object and everything can be subject. On the same page, you might read things I hear and other things I think in my head, and you might not even be able to tell whose story I’m telling. The story I’m telling is not linear, it’s associative, it’s fragmental, and whatever information is missing is filled out effortlessly by your fantasy: The drawing of Barbora reaching up to the blossoms of a tree and telling me “my heart is too big” only hints the love story that unfolds on a subsequent page. We don’t need to know everything, because sometimes, and especially when it comes to traveling, imagination is more delicious than knowledge. 

Imagine you’re wandering through an exotic market and there this mix of noises and images, you pick up snatches of conversations here and there and you smell things and you see things and there are so many impressions that they start to become blurred: This is the sensation I like to convey, not just this is this and that is that, but something of a more multidimensional, intangible nature, a bit like the way our perception and memory works. 

I am not an observer, I am what happens at a certain place at a certain moment, and it is precisely this experience that I like to capture – or to approach, because it is impossible to capture. And what we call “country” or “city” is a construct that only exists at that moment you step into it – while you believe you exist in it, it exists in you, and only exists in you. It is an experience, it is completely fluid, it is but it is many countries and many cities overlapping, you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends: A place, a country, a city is something that is made of moments, it is ephemeral, and in my sketchbook, I want to convey that taste of this ephemeral, precious place that only exists for a moment, with its voices, faces, stories, patterns. This place that only exists once and then never again. 

This book is the home of a country called Meghalaya that only exists between the pages of the book, the Meghalaya of Barbora and the Assamese storyteller and many others, humans, and spirits, who for a short while, or for an eternity, live between the magic mountains and enchanted forests of Meghalaya: This is a country that ends with the last page. And starts to live again somewhere else, as something else. 

My book Meghalaya is available here.
And this is Barbora.

The mistake as a gift

I almost never make preliminary sketches, especially not with line drawings. I really enjoy drawing freely and intuitively, and for me, the raw quality of directness has more value than perfection.
That said, I make a lot of "mistakes" when I draw.

In this drawing, if you look closely, you can see that there is another "mistaken" drawing underneath. You can recognize a face in the area of her right armpit, you can also see some unnecessary lines crossing the wings of the bird in the lower right area – and the only reason why there is so much black in that drawing is that there was a lot to cover up.

What started as a mistake became one of my favorite drawings of that book – I even used it for the cover. Without that mistake, it would have never come into existence.
And as much as I still get irritated when I make a mistake and mess up a drawing, I've also become much more relaxed about mistakes. I don't see them necessarily as something bad.

A mistake rather is something that takes you out of your comfort zone, and it can be a great chance and can lead to interesting things – provided you you don't tear out the page and close the chapter, but use it as a ground to let something else grow out of it. Over the years, that kind of "problem-solving" for me even has become a quite interesting and entertaining aspect of my drawing process – it's almost a bit like a game.
I am convinced that most mistakes can be turned into happy accidents – my work is full of them, and so is my life.

This is a page from my book MEGHALAYA, a sketchbook full of drawings, stories, and poems, made while staying with the Khasi tribe in Meghalaya, North East India. The Khasi are matrilineal and matrilocal, which means that all property belongs to women, and a family inherits the mother’s name.