Soon after Apple released the iPad in 2010, the artist David Hockney got one from California. He realised that the size and Apple Pencil allow great amount of detail and precision, and he started using the device for portraits and landscapes.
That the iPad can be a great tool in the hands of an artiste has already been shown but what about Indian artists who are using the iPad to its full potential? The 2023 edition of India Art Fair will showcase an array of cutting-edge contemporary and digital artistic talent creating artworks on the iPad Pro. To experience the power of digital art at the India Art Fair, The Studio will house a selection of tech-meets-art projects and installations.
This will include a dedicated Digital Residency Hub showcasing artworks made by the three India Art Fair Digital Artists in Residence, all made on iPad Pro, and in response to the theme ‘Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary’. “We’re proud to showcase cutting-edge immersive projects by our first-ever Digital Artists in Residence Mira Felicia Malhotra, Gaurav Ogale and Varun Desai in a dedicated art-meets-tech Studio space at India Art Fair 2023.
From digital illustration, animation, coding and video installation to mixed media, it’s been thrilling to see a new generation of artists who’re using the power of digital technology to break boundaries of artistic expression and storytelling,” says Jaya Asokan, fair director, India Art Fair on the Digital Artists in Residence.
Visual artist and illustrator, Mira Felicia Malhotra will highlight the “oddities and idiosyncrasies of Indian family life” through portraits of women titled ‘Loag Kya Kahenge’. Artist, poet and writer Gaurav Ogale will invite audiences to explore the “extraordinary biographies of ordinary people” through an audio-visual book anthology series ‘Bestsellers’. Multidisciplinary artist Varun Desai will create an “immersive projection room giving a glimpse of the future”, one that fuses artificial intelligence and human consciousness. The artists are creating artworks on the iPad Pro.
To broaden the participation base, Today at Apple will offer attendees at the fair hands-on sessions led by the three Digital Artists in Residence and Creative Pros focusing on digital art skills on iPad to unlock new styles and techniques.
Varun Desai
The Calcutta-based artiste, creative coder, designer and music aficionado has been working around 3D effects for a long time. He has gone far beyond it.“We are progressing into a new digital reality,” said the multitalented Varun Desai. His ambition is to reach deeper and expose the building blocks of our reality today — the sound waves, pixels and voxels that make up digital and physical space — to give us a “look into the architecture of the world we are entering into, and make people familiar with what is underneath” the technological mesh that we are already living in.
Using tools like Processing on iPad Pro, which he calls a “flexible software sketchbook,” the artist flexes his technical and imaginative muscles, producing rules and inputs for his system to produce dynamic artworks, more than the sum of their parts. This can take any number of forms, from optical art gifs in which mesmerising patterns of lines move and play tricks on the eye and perception to immersive projection and sound mapped rooms.He has been experimenting with the many applications available on App Store designed specifically for the iPad, for everything from sound recording to sketching and most excitingly, 3D scanning through the LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor on iPad Pro.
Using LiDAR technology, which lets him rapidly capture and generate 3D scans of spaces, instead of flat photographs, he has been taking to the streets of Calcutta, creating a three-dimensional reality in parallel to the ‘real’ trees, taxis and building facades.
Mira Felicia Malhotra
Mira Felicia Malhotra, aka Kohla, is known for bold feminist pop-art. She makes illustrations, animations, murals and zines.“I’m primarily interested in showing Indian women in ways that are typically missing in mainstream media,” said the artist, who wants to dig deeper into women’s ambitions, passions, passing thoughts and greatest desires, “I want to show more women as bodybuilders, as space explorers, as angry women or even evil women — women occupying spaces in ways we don’t usually accept. I think this comes to me from my own fantasies, a desire to be able to live life in many ways.”
Born in New Delhi and raised in Riyadh till age 11, her sensibilities are shaped by TV cartoons like Bugs Bunny and The Jetsons, the marshmallow stars and planets in the special editions of Count Chocula breakfast cereal, and the aisles of the huge toy stores in the country. The Mumbai girl loves sketching on the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. “I’m too in love with the undo button. It isn’t about being afraid of mistakes, but being able to make improvements as I go along and being able to create my best work. Working digitally allows me room to play around, without a loss of accuracy,” she has said.
Gaurav Ogale
The digital artist loves the past. In his video and multimedia works, Gaurav Ogale harnesses the “unexplainable power of nostalgia”, paying homage to his childhood in Pune and life in Mumbai.“I remember a lot and I hate leaving things behind,” said the artist. “And so I have to find a different way to carry my memories. For me, this means translating them into audio and video pieces. I create them so that I can keep revisiting my memories.”
With no fixed studio space, he uses the iPad Pro often. “I carry the objects that allow me to think and create,” he says, “not only tools like my iPad Pro on which I take to write and draw, but also the more sentimental objects that ground me.”Before ideas can take visual form, the artist writes out his thoughts either on paper or Notes app when using the Magic Keyboard connected to his iPad Pro.
“It could be a poem, some bullet points or a long letter,” he said. “Writing is a way for me to build a world in which the visuals will live.” And often, it is a single word that unlocks the work for him, that makes him “feel a certain way” and sets him off on the visual journey.