Saturday, March 08, 2008

Across the Universe



Meet Shilo Shiv Suleman, foundation student, Shrishti, B'lore. Beautiful beautiful illustrations...



(Psst... She's Kaveri's friend from school)

IMAGES COPYRIGHT SHILO SHIV SULEMAN

7 comments:

MASALA CHAI said...

This is amazing, thanks for posting this. Looking at student work restores my faith in India's artistic future !

Shreyas said...

:D

like menon said the other day, to see other work that so resembles the sort of things one is interested in is so
"disturbing but comforting"

What say?

MASALA CHAI said...

I have no idea who menon is if that comment was directed at me :)
but I do recognize your pseudonym.

Shreyas said...

hehe no, the comment was more important that who said it.

But dont you think it makes sense? Everyone's heading the same way, each adding their own uniqueness, if we may call it that, to this visual culture. We just had a course in aesthetics where we had BIG discussions about what is art, what is design, why kitcsh is in, is 'indian graphics' really art, what is Indian...profoundly confounding was what it became.

@masalachai: what are your views on the questions that I just threw at whoever reads this post?

Shreyas said...

still @masalachai:
yesss! eeet ees the won and wonly sooper tam!

*dappankuthu begins*

MASALA CHAI said...

Well Sooper Tam , I really wish I was at that discussion. I really regret missing out on the Indian perspective during art school but coming back to the Q , well I beg to differ , I don't think everybody is doing the same work. If you are specifically examining a particular genre like Indian pop art or Indian Kitsch - there is bound to be similarities. We draw inspiration from Indian street culture/graffiti/Film posters & Billboards etc. This is pretty much the common point of departure.

I can understand the reaction of it being "disturbing but comforting" , I would feel the same if I were an artist producing works that dealt with similar themes. I think we have so much to explore about ourselves and our collective cultures from a land like India.

While an art school education can do wonders, from time to time I feel like it limits us. During my own time in college, I saw how the kids from China and Japan could hardly articulate their thoughts but their work was way way better than ours.

There are so many factors really (this would be a conversation easier had in person) . I do however hope that Indian artists don't get too complacent and use our culture as a crutch.

The reason for me to start the blog was quite simply that I scoured the net for a place to find cool/amazing/mind blowing Indian artists that weren't the same names staring at me from pretentious/academic(boring) art journals. This task proved to be much harder than I imagined ! Hopefully by starting something , other people will be egged on or inspired to create better work, work that doesn't look like "remixed" versions of eachother.

As for me personally thinking of these things as art, ofcourse I do. But this calls for a whole other discussion about what should and shouldn't be regarded as art. It's a very personal/subjective thing.


(*follows suite with kick ass dapankuthu moves*

Shilo Shiv Suleman said...

Hey! Thats me!
Woohoo! :O)
haha. I was roaming around the internet and found this
and then found me!
joy :O)