Renditions With Charcoal Inked Hands

Art, Entertainment, Top story - By JF on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 - 16:38

Priya Sebastian is an artist and illustrator from Bangalore. She says creativity must be expressed on your own terms and nothing else is an option. This cat loving, baking addicted and Picasso inspired artist shares snippets of her journey with JF.

JF: What have been your earliest memories related to Art?
PS: I remember arriving at school one day in Class 1, I must have been some 5 years old then, it was ‘Open Day’ and several of my classmates ran towards me, their eyes shining and they said, ‘Priya, there are three boards full of your drawings!’ And sure enough, I found that my class teacher had torn out all the drawings from my book and pasted them on the boards at the entrance. All my classmates were looking at me with awe. I was pleased enough, but I remember being mystified why my drawings should be considered worthy of so much attention.

JF: Was it an emotional a decision to choose to become an artist, on your own terms?
PS: When you make a decision to express yourself creatively, it has to be on your own terms. I found that whenever I wanted to do anything that wasn’t on my terms, it led to a great deal of unhappiness and frustration. When I returned from Australia after completing a Masters degree in Illustration, like all artists here in Bangalore, I did try a lot of different things to earn a living –teaching, illustrating for newspapers and publishers and even web designing. I still do some of these things. In retrospect, the initial experiences and interactions were invaluable. They eventually made me aware of what I don’t want to do, what I don’t want to turn into and what I will never compromise on. Now, by a process of elimination, I have landed here, where I am now, expressing myself the way I do and still figuring things as I go along.

JF: Most of the paintings that you do for yourself feature you and your cat as the subject. Why is that?
PS: Not all the pictures feature me. They just happened over time. The most recent picture is a portrait of me in my garden with a cat on my lap. It is probably a reflection of my life now at present. And yes, I like cats. I find their dignity and self assurance inspiring. I have a 15 year old cat called Cindy. Our adoration for each other is mutual.

JF: Over the years, your style of painting has evolved from structured, trained images to more freer and expressive styles. What have been your influences?
PS: The biggest influence for me has probably been the works of Picasso. What has inspired me is the abandon with which he draws, his boldness. It is as if he challenges the viewer with his pictures by saying, ‘End result and opinion be damned, I’ve enjoyed doing this and that’s all that matters!’

JF: When and how did you discover your own style?
PS: There was this trying phase in my life where I was overwhelmed by a lot of excess emotion. I didn’t know where to channel the energy that was consuming me. I mentioned this to a friend who suggested that whenever I felt suffocated, I should just drop everything, get up and draw. I did just that. I had with me, a cylinder of Chunky Charcoal which I’d never used before. It is a thick cylinder of fine charcoal and is best worked on large sheets of paper. It is a very powerful tool and compared to pencil, rather like the difference between using a drill and a rocket launcher. I simply could not afford to be diffident when I used such a medium. I was floored by the results- the expressiveness that was offered up to me and there was no looking back after that.

JF: How do you keep yourself motivated? - to come up with new themes, subjects and styles?
PS: I try to keep myself visually stimulated as much as possible through my world around me. The net is a great source of inspiration; I get to see works of other artists and illustrators. I read a lot. Great literature, expressiveness through words can be a wonderful inspiration for a painting. I try to visit my favourite art galleries as often as possible and interact with artists and creative people whose opinions I respect. All these are great sources of motivation to me. However, there are times when nothing happens and I don’t know what to do. Those times can be very frustrating but I have learned to accept it as part of the creative process and as a recharging of batteries.

Regarding ‘style’, I do not consciously come up with a style. It is a mysterious reaction that takes place when I work on a picture. If I do analyse it, it is perhaps best compared to handwriting which emerges when one puts pen to paper. Style evolves (or regresses) constantly like character in a person.

JF: Seeing how integral art is to you, how do you handle the business side of art?
PS: An artist’s work can be very isolating at times, but it is the business side that keeps us in touch with reality. If I want to sit around and eternally hem and haw about getting my work out there, I try and remember two things – I once read somewhere that if a tree flowers in isolation it does not exist because there is no one to appreciate it. And an artist once wrote on her blog: ‘The whole point is to get paintings hanging on other people’s walls’. So one goes out there with one’s paintings and does what one has to do.

JF: Many, including JF, have come to know about you through your popular blog. How do you see the internet as a tool in your work?
PS: In Bangalore, I haven’t come across reference libraries that house books on every possible subject under one roof like they do in most major cities the world over. In its absence, internet becomes a great substitute when one needs reference material, whether it is to find out what a Dung beetle looks like for a story or to get inspired by the works of Roger Van Der Weyden or to even know what illustrators are showing at the Bologna Ragazzi book fair, it is all there on the screen in front of me.

Blogging gives me a great platform to express myself with words and visuals. My stories would never have come about if I wasn’t looking for something fresh to post. Also putting up one’s pictures on a blog, has helped me view it from a distance hence giving me a better perspective on what my work must look like to an audience.

JF: What are your other interests besides painting/illustrations?
PS: Like most artists I know, I listen to music as I work. I am a Western Classical music buff. At the moment I am enjoying Yoyo Ma playing Bach on the Cello.
Reading is part of my life, both on the net and also through books. I make it a point to read novels by the latest Nobel prize winner of the year for literature. I cannot get over the latest winner Herta Muller’s haunting book, ‘The Land of Green Plums’. It was a revelation. I also bake passionately. But this year that has been grudgingly restricted to once a month for obvious reasons. Half a Sticky Date pudding is crying out to me in the freezer, ‘Take me, take me!’, but I’ll ignore it for now.

JF: What are you currently working on?
PS: I am currently working on a series of illustration involving memories from my past. I hope to convey their mood, colour and emotion onto paper.

JF: Would you say there are difficulties / challenges of being a woman artist?
PS: None that I consider worthwhile enough to articulate. It is challenging being an artist but that is probably true for every profession.

JF: What would be your advice to upcoming women artists?
PS: Stay away from pompous male artists. They are a waste of time. Instead, sit in your studio and practise, practise, practise…

You can see Priya Sebastian’s work on her blog