By Meenakshi Iyer
New Delhi, Feb 10 (IANS) Artists never really leave anything alone. If you give them a tool it’s going to get used. The prophetic words of art connoisseur Bill Goldston resounded as one witnessed the digital artworks of three brilliant artists at the ongoing India Art Fair here.
Taking mixed media art to a whole new level, Varun Desai, Mira Felicia Malhotra and Gaurav Ogale used the Apple iPad Pro to do things at the sort of speed at which the artist can imagine, well almost!
“Apple has been providing me with the best technology for this whole thing… An artwork like mine has a whole bunch of layers, so I am able to create about 150 layers at a really huge size. You can see that I am actually drawing on a small iPad, but it can be blown up to a bigger size,” Mumbai-based visual artist and illustrator Malhotra told IANS.
Malhotra, known for her bold, multicoloured, illustrated portraits of Indian women, feels that her iPad Pro and Apple Pencil help her bring her ideas out into the world quicker than ever.
Aligning with the theme for this year’s showcase, “Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary”, was multidisciplinary artist Desai’s work titled, ‘Dimorphism’ — a digital installation of code-generated video art, 3D LiDAR scanning, hand-drawn animation, and sound synthesis.
“This was created using code. Being a computer engineer, I learnt coding in a very sterile way that was not catered towards creating a visual art. So once this software called processing came along, I was able to channel all this technical knowledge I had to visualise these ideas,” Desai said.
“The next process came from a very powerful aspect of the device which is called LiDAR Scanner, which allows you to scan architectural objects in the real world,” Desai told IANS.
Apple CEO Tim Cook on Friday tweeted that at the first India Art Fair, “Digital Artists in Residence programme shows how technology can unlock creativity”.
“Great to see how iPad Pro is helping artists Mira, Varun, and Gaurav to tap into such incredible creative expression,” Cook said.
A friendly interactive session at the event showed the attendees how to use the iPad Pro along with the Procreate graphic editor app to create basic artworks and unlock new styles and techniques.
“Digital art is the future. I think one needs to be a pro at both — digital as well as traditional art. Using digital tech like Ipads etc will only help us understand art better,” Amisha Garg, a student of Delhi College of Art who attended the digital art exhibit, told IANS.
(Meenakshi Iyer can be reached at meenakshi.i@ians.in)
–IANS
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