Faces of Kathmandu
Improve the world – start with yourself.
I love people and am interested in them. Perhaps that is why portrait drawing has always been one of my favourite artistic pursuits and why I practiced it a lot from a young age.
During my childhood, I attended a course in portrait drawing at the public university and continued to practise diligently thereafter, regularly drawing portraits of friends and family members.
When I took my examination in the summer of 1997, successfully completing my four-year vocational training as a ceramist, my colleagues gave me a beautiful hand-bound sketchbook with fine drawing paper in different colours as a parting gift. As I already knew at the time that I would soon be travelling to Nepal and India for a year and a half, I decided to take the sketchbook with me and record my experiences in it.
After starting my trip to Nepal with a four-week trekking tour in the Annapurna Mountains in the Himalayas, I worked for five months as a ceramics teacher at the Association for Craft Producers (ACP) in Kathmandu. ACP employs mostly women from lower social castes in a variety of crafts, from spinning, weaving, felting and sewing to working with materials such as wood, metal and clay.
Since I interacted with many of the staff and we all had breakfast and lunch together in the canteen every day and I loved the people at my work, I had the idea of making a collection of portrait drawings from my sketchbook with portraits of my colleagues at ACP.
Every day I made one or two portraits, and as soon as word got around, almost everyone of my direct and indirect colleagues wanted to be drawn. And every time a new drawing was made, the staff at the ACP office would make a high-quality copy, which I could then give to the person I had just portrayed. Like this everyone was happy, and my sketchbook slowly filled up page by page with the portraits of my ACP employees until the last page was filled and my project was complete.
As this collection of portrait drawings is a piece of wonderful memory of my great adventure trip in Nepal and India and portrait drawing has always been an important part of my artistic activities, I have selected a number of these portraits for my website, as each face tells its own story.
