Drawing with whool
Improve the world – start with yourself.
Between 1998 and 1999, while living in Nepal and India, I first worked for six months as a ceramics teacher at ACP (Association for Craft Producers) in Kathmandu, before travelling on to India.
My parents were very concerned that I had set off for one-and-a-half years to gain experience as a ceramist in Nepal and India, because at that time there were no fast means of communication such as e-mail or mobile phones.
In the beginning, my father sent me a package of medicine, but I didn’t need it at all. He was clearly under the impression that I was fighting my way through the jungle in Nepal with a machete. To show him that life in Kathmandu is very different from what he might have imagined, I made him a sketchbook with ink drawings of the streets of Kathmandu and wrote a text with each drawing. When I travelled on to India six months later, I gave the book to a German couple, who took it back to Germany for me on the plane and from there sent it to my father by post.
I enjoyed cycling to downtown Kathmandu every day after work to draw. Being very fond of people, I picked various incidents and scenes from the hustle and bustle of street life, made myself comfortable somewhere, armed with ink, brush and drawing pad, and was usually the centre of attention right away. The people I met would sometimes watch me for hours while I drew. Many of them wanted to be drawn themselves and patiently posed for me. Through my daily interaction with people at my work at ACP, I ended up speaking Nepali almost fluently, which often led to interesting conversations while I was drawing.
From the outside, life in Kathmandu and in Indian cities seems like pure chaos. On the streets, cars, buses, tuktuks, bicycles, scooters, rickshaws and pedestrians are all in complete disarray, while by the side of the road “sacred” cows are looking for scraps of food among the smelly rubbish. You would think an accident would happen every second, but somehow the whole chaos organises itself and, strangely enough, it works.
Everyone in this huge crowd has their own life and their own task that they perform every day, and I personally believe that everyone is also always doing their best in their own way – sometimes more and sometimes less.
I will certainly never lose my firm belief in human beings and their inherent strength. Especially during the time when I attentively observed the streets of Kathmandu daily while drawing, I observed people in their daily endeavours with great joy and admiration. It touched me and made me happy.
