Life is a Cartoon

The city is huge and damn fast. Wherever you look, you will only find people in hurry! People going about their daily routine, oblivious to their surroundings, in the hurry to catch a train, a bus or maybe an auto-rickshaw. No one walks here, they all speed-walk! Through the course of your average day you come across many people, you have many interactions. The streets are bustling with interactions, incidents and accidents. Some incidents, you are a mere spectator, some, you’re part of. The tech savvy generation of today documents many of these incidents on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. However there a few who look at these incidents from a very different viewpoint. One of them is Saakshi Vyaas, for whom, such incidents from her daily life become the source of her illustrations. Discovering Mumbai presents the story of ‘Saakshi Vyas’, Mumbai based freelance illustrator.

Paint the Wall

Remember the days when you were kids, armed with crayons in your hands, you went around trying to paint on anything you could lay your hands on! The whole world was a canvas then. Some of us ruined our walls, well that’s what most parents felt, and then we got a good rap from them. Those were the days! Some never gave up that habit of painting the walls; they grew up wanting to paint walls with their creative ideas. For people like Jas Charanjiva, the entire world is still a canvas. She still has that childlike feeling inside of her, and this is what makes her such a great wall artist. This is the story of how Jas Charanjiva became a successful wall artist and is promoting this modern art form in our city of Mumbai. Let’s paint some walls!

'Smokin is for Villans' - Jas's wall art on Chinchpokli Road, Bandra

Jas was born in Kent County, UK, the same place where her childhood hero Mick Jagger was born. She spent half of her childhood in Toronto, Canada, after which her family moved to California. At the age of 6 she discovered David Bowie, the English pop legend known for his distinctive voice and style. Bowie’s style and his works had a significant impact on Jas; she has named her studio ‘Life on Mars’ after one of Bowie’s songs. “He's so conceptual. Costumes, make up, characters. His music was real cool and later I realized how sophisticated it was and appreciated how ahead of his time he was”, says Jas about her idol. At 12 she discovered the world of street art; she was mesmerized by this style of art. Eventually she ended up making a career in street art.

Jas was introduced to the world of street art at the age of 12, when she got her first professional skateboard. The artwork at the bottom of skateboard caught her eye. She started checking out these skateboard artworks in a popular magazine called Thrasher, a magazine dedicated to skating. Her initial trysts with street art where simple works of chalk on sidewalks. Once on her way back home from school, she wrote names of her favourite bands on the sidewalk with chalk. She did this for about a quarter of a mile before her Mom caught her and reprimanded her for this act! Her first wall art was a recreation of an album cover on the walls of a record shop opposite the Church of John Coltrane. On Sunday’s the church would see huge crowd and she wanted to paint something cool with a message for the people waiting in queue to get inside. Her work, commissioned by the record shop, was only an album cover and she could not put any message on it. However, the urge to paint something meaningful with a cool and witty message got her into further exploring this genre of art. She did some legal and some illegal works in San Francisco, California. Most of her works were messages about people living their lives in a bubble.

Few years ago she moved to Hyderabad, when her husband’s company sent him on a three year project to India. After the project was over they decided to stay back in India. The transition from New York City to Hyderabad was not so bad for her; in fact she found it cool to be somewhere different. The only issue was that street art was in a nascent stage in India and Hyderabad, especially, didn’t have anything worthy to be called a piece of art at the time. Mumbai on the other hand had a fair amount of good street art. In places like Chapel Road, Bandra, there is a waiting list of businesses and shop owners who want their walls painted. “Mumbai streets have some good pieces of art but there's not enough of it. Majority of the best work is from artists outside the country. We have some regular artists that visit often to paint here. Like Rock from France and Loomit from Germany”.

Her first solo show was all about bringing street art indoors. She had a huge room of raw concrete to paint. Jas spent 10 days and nights painting the room. The room was very hot and this inspired her to create the theme ‘Fire wall’ for her solo show. This show launched her as an artist in India. Her second exhibition Diamond Dogs + Super Creeps was inspired by David Bowie’s songs and characters. GQ magazine was coming out with a 6 page article on David Bowie, so the online editor of GQ suggested to Jas that she create some event around Bowie the same month. The show happily sold out.

So what is about street art that makes it so special for Jas? “I love the rawness of it, I love that there's no intention of making money out of it. I love that it's based on the love for it. I love there's an unpredictability to it as in one stumbles upon it and it can be painted over the next day or remain there for years”. She also loves the fact that street art is so smart, clever and sometimes witty. Jas feels that there is still a lot to be done to promote street art here in India. She feels that all the talented artists we have in the city should contribute at least one piece outdoors. People in India get to see so little of street art. When they do come across one, they are amazed, but what they can’t understand is “Why someone would do such a thing for free?”

Having established herself as an artist, she now runs her own studio ‘Life on Mars’. The name is derived from one of David Bowie’s songs about a girl who wonders if there’s life on mars, as she feels that life on earth is all messed up. Like the girl in the song Jas too gets affected by the things happening around her and that’s how the messages in her murals come about. Now she is expanding her work to murals for kids. Most of her current works have angry annoyed characters, so now she has to work on making happy characters. Jas plans to continue her street works in Mumbai and all the places that she is invited to. She is also working on selling original art. She would also like to create a few illustrated books in the future. There are a lot of things she wants to do and she is trying her hand at all of them. Given a chance she would like to collaborate with Buff Monster an artist from US and she would also like to work with the Rolling Stones or Bowie on a project. For the time being we just hope that she does more and more street art around Mumbai. The city needs more artists like Jas to change the face of this city, to make it more beautiful through their art! We hope Jas’s works will inspire other talented beginners to take up street art.

You can check out Jas's exciting artwork at - http://about.me/jascharanjiva and http://jascharanjiva.carbonmade.com/

The Digital Artist

The dawn of computers has rapidly transformed our lives in the last two decades. Things which we can do today were only dreams a decade ago. Remember the first time you used a computer? How excited you were to lay your hands on this machine and if you were a kid then you definitely must have spent hours on a painting application colouring a digital canvas with lots of colour and creativity!

Fast forward to 2012 and the humble paint app has been overtaken by serious, technological marvels like Adobe Photoshop, Corel and a host of other applications. These mean machines and software’s have spawned a new generation of artists, armed with a tablet computer and an electronic paintbrush; these artists are charting into new worlds through their work and in the process have created a new form of art – the digital art. Discovering-Mumbai (DM) came across one such upcoming, extremely promising, unbelivably talented artist - Vasundhara Prakash.

Vasundhara who is a script writer by profession and is currently working on a movie which is supposed to go into production by end of this year, did not start off wanting to be an artist. She is also working on two more scripts. Vasundhara did her Bachelors in Philosophy from Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi and Masters in Arts and Aesthetics from JNU, Delhi. With her thirst for knowledge not satiated she set sail for the distant land of America for her PHD in communication at the University of California, San Diego. However, things didn’t turn out the way she wanted and she came back to India. It was at this point of time that the lure of Bollywood started to beckon her and she decided to pursue a career in Bollywood.

Vasundhara's manipulation of her own picture

Her first assignment in Bollywood was working as the Assistant Director on a film; she also worked on an Indo-French documentary ‘India by Song’ which was aired on TV and also went to Cannes. Later she went into advertising, again as a Director’s Assistant, but she didn’t really enjoy the stressful world of advertising. This is the time when she started writing movie scripts. So how did Vasundhara, the script writer, become Vasundhara the artist? It happened two years ago when she was pondering over a very peculiar issue; the question was how to make her Facebook profile pic stand out. This led her down a path which resulted in her discovery of softwares like Dotmatrix, Pixelmator and Photoshop. Initially she was a bit intimidated by these softwares but she quickly worked her way around them and started churning out some great pictures. She started out working on her own pictures and later she also tried her hand at manipulating pictures of her friends. When her friends saw her work they were amazed and started using her works as their profile pictures on Facebook. Soon what had started out as a pastime started to develop into a passion. Her initial attempts were simple manipulations of photographs. Later she started adding different elements along with the photos and her distinctive style started to develop.

One of her works, displayed at The Bagel Shop, Bandra

Vasundhara’s digital artworks are a blend of photographs and drawings, and a host of other elements. She mixes these elements elegantly to create stunning visuals. Her works are peppered with lots of bright colours. A female subject is central to almost all of her paintings. When asked to explain one of her works she replied, “My paintings are very instinctive, I do not think about a particular theme when I draw. I don’t even label my works as it makes them very restrictive and makes people think about the work in a particular way”. Vasundhara has made almost 160 pieces of digital paintings so far, out of which she is displaying 15 at her first solo exhibition at ‘The Bagel Shop’ in Bandra. The exhibition runs till July 15th. She is visibly excited about her exhibition, because when she started out, the thought that one day she would be exhibiting her work to the public never crossed her mind. A lot of her excitement also stems from the positive response that she has been receiving from people. So far she has been successful in selling eight of her fifteen works and a lot of requests for reprints of these sold works. A lot of people have told her that her works are actually underpriced!

Friends and family were the ones who motivated her in going public, they also happen to be the ones who constantly give her the feedback she needs. Her brother, in particular, is one of her biggest critic. The first time she displayed her work was at a fair at Mocha Mojo, Bandra. She had displayed three of her works at Mocha Mojo alongside a host of other artists. One of her works has been used as the cover of a book and she has also designed one specifically for a book. Post her solo exhibition she has got an offer from a lady in Denmark who organizes online art exhibitions. She is also looking for other venues in Mumbai to display her works but she admits that she would not really like her work to be put up in some art gallery. As an arts student she knows that it can get very intimidating for people to go to a gallery. She is grateful to 'The Bagel Shop' for providing her the opportunity to display her works with such openness and warmth.  There are very few genuine places in Mumbai, like 'The Bagel Shop', which provide a platform to upcoming artists for presenting their work

The artist, who was never really interested on a real paintbrush and canvas, says that in India digital art is not given its due credit. A lot of people still don’t take it as a serious form of art. People do not understand the time, creativity and hardwork that goes into making a digital painting. But such perceptions are not going to let her down, for sure.  Post her successful exhibition, her confidence is sky high and all that she is thinking about is taking her passion for painting to the next level. Vasundhara wants to continue doing both scripts and digital paintings, she really can’t choose between the two. With her movie ready to go into production we understand the excitement that she is going through. Her successful exhibition must have taken that excitement to cloud nine levels. We wish her all the best for her movie project and hope to see more of her works soon.

You can check out more of Vasundhara's works on her flickr page - http://www.flickr.com/photos/vasundharaprakash/
or at the Bagel Shop at Bandra before her exhibition ends on July 15.