BENGALURU: When you go to a fancy restaurant and get served a scrumptious looking food, what do you immediately do? Take your cellphone out and snap a story for social media. A small group of people in the city is trying to slow down the rapid digitisation of everything around us and make us observe more. This they do by promoting sketching over snapping.
“The best and the easy food to sketch is pasta,” says Parinitha Konanur, a Bengaluru-based artist, who has been sketching food for years, besides other subjects. “There are times when my friends start clicking pictures while I take out my sketching book,” she laughs.
Parintha Konanur will be conducting her first food sketching workshop on June 10 at Dialogues Cafe, in collaboration with Travel of Art.
Travel of Art is a one-woman run organisation that started in Mumbai a year ago and recently came to Bengaluru. The idea is to travel for art.
Meghana Biwalkar, founder of the organisation says, “We travel to rural places and cities and sketch landscape, infrastructures and food all through our travel,” says Meghana.
Sketching over snapping
Snapping is easy, done in seconds. However choosing the right angle and filters and adding captions would take as much time as completing half the sketching, believes Meghana. “That is why sketching pasta is easy,” says Parinitha. “You can eat it slow and turning cold won’t change it much, unlike biryanis... Even the colours of Arrabita pasta is fun to water colour.”
“While drawing food, you observe it and relish its ingredient,” says Meghana. “You eat with all five senses.” Meghana’s first attempt of sketching food was a sandwich, which she drew while eating. She also keeps notes to her sketching. “You know how people used to keep journals in the olden times and flip through the pages to remind us of memories?” asks Parinitha.