I felt very mixed about Goa when I arrived. I was seeking warmth and it certainly has this. But it felt very different from the rest of India. More finished off and it was much more expensive. I have spent more than double here in one month than I did in Rajasthan. But having two kids and flights at peak times does really set the cat amongst the pigeons financially!
But the Goa pace really grows on you and I realised that I really like staying in places for between four and nine days where the owners are on site and there are about five rooms. This means you often eat with other guests but have freedom during the day to do your own thing. I shall be sad to be leaving.
Logo ideas
One thing I wanted to do was design a logo to fit with my theme – not the now morphed purple, spiral and prime one but the original one – How Time Goes Faster as You Get Older. It was going to be in purple or its shades, and it would heavily feature spirals and if I was going to do a series of them in a particular medium then it would be a prime number! I did five or seven in fact.
I started off on the beach in Mandrem, north Goa. This was an easy place to do this as were staying virtually on the beach and our particular part had no deck chairs or cafes on the sand. So, this meant there was ample space for me to do some sand drawings or rather swirly spiral shapes using my fingers in the wet sand once the tide went out. Some people did come up and ask me what I was doing but mostly this was in Russian and so I just had to shrug and say I didn’t speak Russian.
I then did further logo ideas using water colours, acrylic paints and drawing them on the computer. I photographed them around the very pretty place I was staying in Majorda, South Goa at Vivenda dos Palhaços (www.vivendagoa.com).
So, the bottom line. I had fun making up these logo ideas and no I don’t have a preferred one that I could decide is my logo favourite. So, my logo ideas will remain as that. Ever changing.
They have to be free flowing, fluid, purple and spirally often with dots. Because if you can’t draw (and really, I can’t and cannot be bothered to learn) then dots and swirly shapes are easy. Even for me.
Post soap shavings project
I wasn’t sure what to do with the soap that I had shaved and used in the spiral soap shaving project (see earlier blog on 7th Jan). I squished a load of the spirals together and thought I could make some montages using some glitter netting I had bought in Margao. I had bought some new stick on jewels and I still had a lot of my original washi tapes to use up. It is a fun project but it needed special packing with fleece to protect it to return to London.
Spirals
It was quite early on that I realised my understanding of the my them about How Time Goes Faster as you Get Older would embrace spirals as central.
Of course, as it is one thing I can doodle and so being able to draw spirals would be an added bonus. Actually, a necessity when you are as rubbish at drawing as I am! This particular project was started by Amy Russell who is working with Casa Susegad to increase their social media footfall.
She went around taking photos of spirals for me. Oh, and Rory the kitten she has been charged to care for!
Once you start you can go a bid mad seeing spirals everywhere. Especially in Goa where many people have wrought iron gates often with spiral designs.
And spirals abound in nature too.
I decided that as frangipani is my most favoured flower scent here, I could do another project with them if I made them into a spiral and swung them about on a swing. I did also twist up the swing but that video really is too much. Just them swinging backwards and forwards is enough!
And then I met Robb Lawton whilst staying at Olaulim Backyards (and he got the whole spiral thing so I have three links connected to him and his sons). Robb was an engineer but is now retired and a keen cyclist and pianist. Here he is playing https://soundcloud.com/user-489434128/the-windmills-of-your-mind the Windmills of Your Mind – yup pretty spiral I think? Well enough to fit in the theme! One son (Tom) is an inventor and I love his solar powered spiral made from plastic waste dredged from the sea (https://www.tomlawton.com/) and the other (Will) is a musician and composer (https://www.willlawtonmusic.co.uk/). I was drawn to his piece the Golden Ratio. This is found everywhere in nature and here is the simplest explanation I could find. The Golden Ratio (also known as the Golden Section, Golden Mean, Divine Proportion or Greek letter Phi – φ (uppercase) ϕ (lowercase)) exists when a line is divided into two parts and the longer part (a) divided by the smaller part (b) is equal to the sum of (a) + (b) divided by (a), which both equal 1.618. Reading it back through maybe I don’t really understand it! And even if the golden ratio isn’t really a spiral the lower case letter phi ϕ is certainly spiralish! So the Lawton men are very creative but I loved the Lawton women I met (Lynne – Robb’s wife and Katie his daughter who runs Bhuj house where I stayed whilst in Gujarat).
Water and Rainbows
One morning after my run along the nature trail I was having my breakfast when I noticed some the nearby foliage was being watered. It was a lovely sound but when I went closer there were rainbows to be seen and photographed. And as we all know. One of the colours is purple!
I loved the way the camera catches the water and the dashed linear lines of the rainbow.
Next time I will be in the final month of my sabbatical. I will start in Hampi in the Indian state of Karnataka. This has loads of temples and boulders which look like they have come from outer space.
