The East Coast Chronicles

Yesterday, Zane showed me the books he bought for me. They were Daler-Rowney sketch books with beautiful art cover and exquisite ivory pages inside made of acid free paper.

Yes, both of us can get pretty excited over mere books!

He loved them so much, he borong all seven of them from the art supplies store in Ulu Kelang. Some will be for him to do his drawings. Some will be for me to do my writings. The original price was RM50 (art supplies are never cheap), but because it was old stock, the books were tagged at RM22, and because Zane offered to clear the stock, he got them for RM17 each.

But believe me, I've seen Zane spend thousands at a time for a whole year's worth of canvas, paints, brushes and an assortment of art-related stuff at Nanyang Art Shop in Penang.

Anyway, buying the sketch books was just another step towards realising our East Coast Chronicles project. Actually, the project doesn't have an official name yet (the two of us haven't had a decent length of time together to actually discuss the details of the project yet). I just created that on the fly. It might change later on...knowing how fickle I am about these things!

The project started out as something we dreamed up over lunch some weeks back. It fits into the larger picture of us wanting to expand our art business, me wanting to quit my day job and focus on The Art Room, our little studio-gallery-home, and him making his art career fly.

Since I started working in this tourism line, and since Zane has this uncanny ability to find some amazingly beautiful places and experiences, we've really found Malaysia to be a real gem. I'm not just saying that to promote Malaysia as a holiday destination, though I reckon Tourism Malaysia ought to pay me more for this free plug.

We've really seen so many nice sides of Malaysia, places that need a little effort to get to, but all worth the trouble. On our holidays and mini detours, we've inadvertently found some treasures -- a secret beach at Hentian Kecil, a really great kway teow soup food stall and delicious mini nasi lemaks for only 50 sen in Langkawi, and a beautiful sunset view in Penang.

Both of us love the east coast and we just know that there are many secret, unexplored, ignored places there that are just waiting for us!

So this project will see us traveling to the east coast and documenting our journey -- both in writing and drawing. So many of the places in the east coast Zane had painted before no longer exist due to development, erosion or some reason or other. And so, we just feel that it was important for us to make a record of our journey -- Narrations in prose and painting (is that a possible exhibition title?).

At the end of the project, we hope to put up an exhibition, mainly of his paintings, supported by my writings.

The details of this project, like I said, have not been worked out yet. But, one by one, we are making efforts towards realising this dream.

For a start, I'll have some 40 days of leave next year to apply to go on this journey! Yay!