Meet Gaurav, Mira, and Varun, as I did, along the sidelines of the India Art Fair. Participants of a special showcase at the India Art Fair under their Digital Artists in Residence programme, these three multidisciplinary artists are three of a new breed of artists who are breathing new life into their art by leveraging technology. The common thread that ties all three together is their ability to take tools like iPad Pro or Mac and marry them with their creative process to the point where you cannot tell them apart. I met with the three artists at a special media preview to understand their creative process and came away stunned at the applications of Apple’s technology in creativity and imagination. Here’s a sample of my experience. If you’re in New Delhi, I would highly recommend you drop by India Art Fair between February 10th and 12th and meet the artists at the dedicated Digital Residency Hub within The Studio.
For the first time as an in-person event in India, Apple is hosting their highly popular Today At Apple sessions at the Fair where attendees can learn to create artwork on the iPad. Apple CEO Tim Cook shone the spotlight on the three artists and the India Art Fair when he tweeted earlier today “The first @IndiaArtFair Digital Artists in Residence program 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”.
Dimorphism: Between the digital and the physical
Kolkata-based Varun Desai is a man of many talents. With a background in coding, a love for music, and a flair for the arts, Varun works in an intersection of all these, which is called Dimorphism. It’s a digital installation that combines mathematically accurate, code-generated video art, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scanning, and hand-drawn animation with synthesised sound. It works across a bevy of multiple devices – from synthesisers and iPad Pro (with Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil) to Mac Studio and Studio Display. As I stood transfixed within his installation, I felt curious about the life-sized wireframed moving human figures as they moved towards an alternate, digital reality. Varun explained that he used the LiDAR scanner on the iPad Pro to 3D-capture one of his associates the day prior and then bring the human dimensions into Nomad Sculpt (an app to create, sculpt, and paint in 3D). Subsequently, he followed that up by exporting the models to the Procreate app for colouring, texturing, and airbrushing. The heavy lifting for the rigging and animation work was performed on the M1 Max Mac Studio and Studio Display, where he was able to render his "animations really quick and achieve the final high-resolution video that he needed for his installation", allowing him to quickly visualise what it’s going to look like while he is "working on it rather than having to wait until installation day". Accompanying the borderline hallucinatory effect of the visual installation is the music that interacts with the viewer – modern musique concrète (a type of music composition that uses recorded sounds as raw material). "A lot of what I’m doing for Dimorphism comes from taking sounds of the real world and playing them back in different ways," Desai said. Walking out of the installation, Desai said he’s "still scratching the surface of what's possible." Personally, I love when art pushes the limits of technology, and Varun is the perfect case in point.
Log Kya Kahenge: What we show and what we are
Visual artist and illustrator Mira Felicia Malhotra’s work touches on a rather familiar aspect of our lives – the contrast between the outside-in view and the lived reality of our families. Through her showcase titled Log Kya Kahenge ('What Will People Say?'), Mira showed us what seemed like any other set of bold, multicoloured, beautifully hand-drawn (on iPad) family portraits, all of which showed happy, conformist families. Bring up the Artivive augmented reality app on iPad or iPhone and point the camera at the portraits and the images spring into life, revealing the true dynamics of the families – from a father with an uncontrollable temper to a looming image of a mother-in-law peering down on a newly-wed couple. Malhotra expressed that she took rather naturally to the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil for taking her ideas from concept to execution. She sketches on the iPad Pro with her Apple Pencil in the Procreate app; she additionally captures images of her subjects on the iPhone and adds layers of illustrations. Procreate’s ability to export files in Photoshop’s native PSD format lets her perform additional editing of her artwork on Adobe Photoshop later in the process on her Mac.
Best-sellers: Ordinary stories, transformed
By his own admission, Gaurav Ogale is of no fixed address; he takes a nomadic approach to finding muses and turning them into art. The digital artist and storyteller has been travelling since the age of 16, turning the memories of the people he meets into animated short films. Titled Best-sellers, his work aims to redefine what it means to see a book on the bestsellers list so popular at bookstores and airports across the world. Instead of seeing stories of business tycoons or sports figures, Ogale’s bestsellers — told by flipping through digital pages on an iPad Pro embedded in a vintage-styled physical book — document stories of everyday people and their trials and tribulations. Taking his notes — a thought, a poem, or even just a memory — he starts by sketching on Procreate on the iPad Pro and editing on Photoshop. He painstakingly draws each frame in Procreate, and composites the video file in Adobe Premiere on his MacBook Pro, bringing in the audio recordings (that we so enjoyed at the exhibit) from his iPhone. As a self-confessed Luddite, Gaurav has ramped up surprisingly fast on the iPad Pro, furthering the point that a device like the iPad can just as easily step out of the way and let the creative expression flow.
Bringing out the Artist in YOU
Each of the apps showcased by the three artists is available on the Apple App Store, which can appeal to folks looking to dabble in art or the casual sketchers who want to rise above the 'can't draw to save my life' phase. Procreate is one such tool, one that I personally swear by, which has hundreds of brush types, precise colour control, and a bunch of gestures that can quickly become second nature. The Adobe Creative Cloud suite finds popular mention, and the subscription-based offering is available for MacOS and iOS for powerful image editing and correction. Personally, I’m looking to play around with Nomad Sculpt, at least to scratch the surface of the work Varun showed us at the Fair.
Disclosure: This columnist attended the India Art Fair at the invitation of Apple for a special media preview. Tushar Kanwar is a tech columnist and commentator and tweets @2shar.