24"x36" ~ watercolor on paper

From a seat in the ruins of an amphitheater, I sat and watched the breathtaking sunset light up the Athenian Acropolis.

Drawing this took me back to the A'Level Art days, complete with the standard 300-rupee Winsor and Newton paper, watercolor box, wooden board and masking tape.

This was also a way to make an architecture drawing project more interesting because people are important and without them architecture is just background stuff. Here they are one and the same thing. Some detail photographs follow.

I call these memory sketches.

Caught without a functioning camera at a moment of elation and wonder, faced with a sight so perfect in composition, energy, serenity or movement, I had urge to immortalize what I experienced. So I did these very, very quickly so as not to lose the “impression” of what the moment felt like. These were sketches not meant to be seen by others but I think they are interesting because to you they are scribbles but for me they conjure the scene once again.

The first is a quick sketch of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, late at night. I sat there for a few moments amidst a crowd, and calls of the tea and corn vendors on way back to my hostel on Saturday night. The second is the expansive horizon of Athens, comfortably embedded in the hills, viewed from the Acropolis. The third sketch records the calm ruins of an amphitheater at the same place.

"It was as a grown-up man that I first stood on the hill of the Athenian Acropolis, surrounded by ruined temples, gazing out over the blue sea.

"Mingled with my happiness was a sense of astonishment that came to me as: so it really is true, what we were taught at school! How shallow, how feeble must have been the belief I had acquired then in the actual truth of what I was being told for me to feel such surprise now!"

I read this in Sigmund Freud's essay The Future of an Illusion, in the little book I started after The Counterfieters, yesterday as I had Nargileh at a place near Tophane.