The Illustrator’s Collective is a group of four designers, each in their own right — Bakula Nayak, Kalyani Ganapathy, Shreyas R. Krishnan and Trusha Sawant — who came together for their love of illustration. In their recent exhibition “My Cup of Tea” at Kynkyny, the group you could see how they are bringing different techniques and styles of illustration together in one space to provide a platform to showcase their work to people.
“The idea is also to make illustration as a concept more available to people because otherwise you’d probably see it in the context of books or the Internet,” they say. It is also a chance to look at illustrations from up-close, where they can be seen in full detail and quality.
“A lot of illustrators use stories to interact with people looking at their work and have them understand where the work came from. Traditionally an illustration is an interpretation of the written word and essentially we are all storytellers.”
Each of them tells different stories, drawing from their observations and life experiences.
Hidden in Plain Sight
Shreyas R. Krishnan uses oil pastels, showing women in the burqa in amusing urban settings, eating ice lollies or street food, window shopping, checking for missed calls on their mobile phones or sitting down for “afternoon conversations” with their skirts hitched up.
“The treatment used, is basically cutting away the black and leaving it in places I want it to be there. It connected nicely to the theme considering that it’s about these women who are covered in black,” says Shreyas. “With this series, it was more about the visual of the women covered in black because it’s got a graphic quality. I think there’s a bit of disconnect in what you think the burkha is for because one actually looks at them more because they are wearing it. But more than the social commentary of any sort this was just about things that I see.”
Out of the Blue
Trusha Sawant’s lino and screen prints are quirky; she fills them with images of a dinosaur, Andy’s ashtray (drawn from Andy Warhol’s can of soup) or an enchanted tree, all in shades of indigo.
“Ever since we are children, we grow up socially conditioned to think and behave a certain way. We are always told what to do and what to say and that affects how we observe things, what we see and memorize. So what I try to do through my works is to pick out certain nuances, some oddities that I see in everyday life. Sometimes I give them a whimsical, surreal twist,” explains Trusha. “My use of indigo relates to the way my ideas appeared out of the blue, over random conversations. Also, I think it’s quite a contemplative colour.”
My cup of tea-Ohmy! The things I nd in it!
Bakula Nayak works on vintage paper, using watercolour, pen and ink to create intricate imagery that is absurd, almost fantastical, yet endearing. A snail carries a precarious stack of cupcakes and teacups on its back, or a fat bird perched atop wears a woollen cap while it’s snowing. “I used to collect a lot of vintage paper and a few months ago, I decided to draw again after a long gap. I had stored them for such a long time that giving them new life in a new context excited me,” says Bakula. “And I worked with circumstances from my life. I used to live in New York and I hated the winters there, so the illustration was a statement to that. I used to love drinking tea in the winter, when they would come out with special flavours.”
Memory Box
Kalyani Ganapathy paints landscapes in unusual shades, of pink, orange and brown. Most of these landscapes, of birds in the sunset, toadstools, a “blanket of stars”, or lotus ponds against the sun, are from her memory. “This is the first time I have done landscapes. The work is like a visual journal of many instances in life. They are real life memories, which I have abstracted, to an extent. I use watercolours in a way that it wouldn’t normally be used to paint landscapes,” says Kalyani.
“I enjoy working on minute details using watercolours and also the way different colours run into each other within the form. So there is a lot of exploration of detail in my work. I think the shades of brown lend themselves to a vintage look, of something preserved.”
