Thursday, March 24, 2016

It’s 9:30 pm and the dogs that have been sleeping all day are now having a full-blown concert. When I mentioned this to the residents here, they mention that they have gotten used to it over the years. I have found that earplugs are a necessity in the evenings in the city.
It was going to be a busy day, but it turned out to be pretty chopped up with not as much getting done as we had planned. We have been pretty fortunate up to today with getting a lot accomplished every day.

We started our day strong with Erina Tamraker’s and Asha Dangol’s studio visit. We had met Erina at a painting event on the banks of the Bagmati last week, and she was nice enough to invite us to come to her studio to look at her work. This husband and wife team, who work independently most of the time, worked in a studio complex that housed seven artists who have been sharing a studio complex for 20 years.

 Each small studio was filled with stacks of paintings that they’ve been accumulating over the years. Each artist’s work was very different from the others, but we saw many paintings dealing with the Bagmati River and other issues relating to Kathmandu and Nepal.

We looked at several paintings before heading out to our next meeting back at Barbar Mahal Revisited. We met with Sangeeta Thapa and discussed the show a bit more. I took some drawings of the gallery space where my exhibition and video screening is going to be presented next fall.

We had two hours to kill before our 4 o’clock appointment, so we ran to Kathmandu Durbar Square, where we got a tour of the many temples including the Kama Sutra Temple. It was sad to see so many temples damaged by the earthquake including the “The Hip
pie Temple”, where 80 people died during the earthquake when a blood donation drive was occurring.

We walked briskly back to the gallery for another meeting but found out that it had been postponed until the next day.

We decided to go back to the hotel, put away our camera equipment, take a shower, pack and go the Fire and Ice Restaurant where we met Sangeeta again to discuss exhibition opening dates, exhibition plans, a bit about her life, her family and Nepali culture and politics.

Tomorrow we fly out but first we have three meetings.

We have been very busy and sometimes we get so overwhelmed with everything around us and with our schedule that we forget where we are. I periodically catch myself and say, “Oh yeah, I am half way around the world in Kathmandu….that’s pretty cool”… and then I get sucked up again.

It’ll hit me when I home thinking back on these two weeks. Next November I hope to take it a bit easier.