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Extended Drawing 

In recent times, long bus rides became a part of my everyday routine. This mundane experience of a regular commute added some sort of normalcy to my life during this global pandemic, and at the same time, it would make me extremely aware of the grave reality we live in. On the one hand, seeing my co-passengers in rush to reach their destinations make me realize that life has been the same for many people. On the other hand, when I try to maintain social distancing from a masked person sitting next to me in a crowded busy bus, it only reminds me of the strangeness of the situation. I tried to assemble those fragmented memories of my daily commute on a stretched canvas.
I attempted a style that is different from my usual style of drawing for this project since I wanted to push the boundaries of my comfort zone. Unlike my usual method, I turned away from realistic style this time, and in some steps, I tried to challenge the aesthetic quality of it by resisting my instinctive need to make neat and visually pleasing compositions. I used several types of medium like charcoal, pen, acrylic, pastels, etc. I used collage and applied pieces of canvas on the surface. In some steps I masked areas to expose the layer beneath it. These masked shapes portray the silhouettes of my fellow passengers who were probably standing against bright and sunny windows. I changed the orientation of the surface a few times because I wanted to make every inch of the canvas as busy as the other. The obscure previous layers, elements that were scraped away and worked on again added some sort of dynamism to the work. They also helped me to develop texture on the surface.
In the last step, the work displays a minimalist color palette of grey, black, blue, and yellow, and we see a text that says `STOP’. The text signifies the fact that the work was created in a time when "stop the spread" was a common phrase in the world and it also denotes the stop buttons on the handrails of the buses which we press at the end of our journey.

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