Writer || Curator || Photographer || Musician || 'Artist' || Maker || Video || Press

Some 'Art'

[note: The pictures on the right are a completely incomplete representation of the visual 'art'works that I have produced in life thus far. For example, none of the book-covers or newspaper illustrations I did are included; nor is there anything of a book I illustrated fully, and; nor are quite a few of my paintings that variously found homes with others. Amongst the latter, the largest oil-painting I ever did blew off the roof of a cab in Delhi. LoL!]

In any case,...

I've always been a visual artist, ever since my childhood.

The tap-root of this aspect of my creative personality probably traces back to inspiration - if not awe - from Mr. Dam, who was my arts teacher in the boarding school I spent age 4.5-10 in; St. Edmunds in Shillong. He was so disgusted and demotivated by his life of teaching errant little kids something he was a master at that he'd sometimes spend entire class-periods making chalk-drawings we were expected to copy, that occupied the entire blackboard of the class, using coloured chalk sticks held in his mouth, and once, even stuck up his nose!

The next root was definitely my mum, through the two years after that, that saw me back with my parents, and brothers, in the erstwhile USSR (where my dad was posted as Consul General of India, in Odessa/Ukraine). She'd taken up classical arts classes at a local museum, and was doing excellent oil paintings. Some years later, she even gifted me her lovely paint-box from those days, which I still proudly own.
In time, I actually joined arts college in India, but left that pretty shortly to instead study journalism.

In 1980, a pen-and-ink poster I drew - because there was nobody else to do it - for a music show I'd organized for a magazine I was working with drew such a good response that I spent many evenings for almost a year after that doing more pen-and-ink drawings, many of which I eventually exhibited solo in the Triveni Gallery of Triveni Kalasangam, whose open-air theatre was in fact where the show that triggered it had been held a year earlier.
This was a time when I separately also worked at designing 2 different magazines that I also served as Assistant Editor and feature writer.

Almost 10 years later, I became a sort of 'ghost' illustrator and designer for awhile to sort of 'help' a friend's young new wife, who was sadly incompetent to herself do the book-cover assignments that she was nevertheless managing to pick up as an arts-college graduate. The ruse fell through though when she was assigned to do a book-cover to match a set of illustrations that the publisher already had in hand, from some other artist. What happened was simply that the publisher delved a bit deeper because she liked the cover I did so much that she wanted to replace the entire collection of illustrations for the inside of the book. In the event, I did do the replacement illustrations after all, but did not connect with the publisher after that because she was my friends wife's client, not mine. And so, that is the only book I have ever illustrated entirely. However, an internet search today turns up a version of the book with somebody else listed as the illustrator. Neither version is still in print, and I do not own a copy of either ('The Mahabharata Retold for Children, Bilkiz Alladin, Madhuban Books).

At about the same time, I also began to regularly do illustrations for the colour supplement of the National Herald newspaper and a few other clients.

About the mid-1990s, when I got my first computer, I began to get deeper into visual art and design, to the degree that I actually organized an exhibition of 'digital-art' together with several other artists. However, I eventually pulled the show just a couple of weeks before it was to open, when our sponsor insisted that their large-format printer should be placed in the middle of the gallery.

The early 2000s saw me connect with digital artists all over the world, mainly around my work on The IDEA (Indian Documentary of Electronic Arts), as a result of which I was invited to show prints and screen-works in several exhibitions across Europe, the US, Australia, and India. I discontinued this after awhile though, when I decided that printed digital 'art' was not meant for galleries.

What I did accept though, was to be featured together with just 3-4 other artists/designers from India in Prof. Geoffry Caban's book 'World Graphic Design'.

And, as I have implied at the beginning of this text, I am still alive and kicking.

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The video below, made by the Hungarian artist Tibor Kovacs-Egri, was my segment of a collection of works by digital imaging artists from around the world, that were all together looped on large screens for 3 days in the Buda Castle Tunnel of Budapest, as part of a public festival in 2004, through the course of which the tunnel was closed to all vehicular traffic.

The music of this segment, as well as that of several of the other artists' segments, was made by me.