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“Oh god, words! I keep forgetting words. … I am also really shitty with words and I can’t express myself fully. That’s why I draw,” gushes Pune-based Aditi Mali as she speaks to Homegrown.
To a lot of people, the only thing that measures as deeply as love is art, and in our endeavour to explore what it takes to love fearlessly, we asked four amazing Indian artists about how they continue to love themselves fearlessly through their art.
“My version of self-love is to continue to unabashedly be my bizarre, peculiar and offbeat self,” says Osheen Siva, a Goa-based illustrator and a street artist. If you remember The Priest’s speech about love from Fleabag (2019), you might be able to recall him saying that love is indeed messy, awful, and painful. But when you love, it feels like hope and being endlessly hopeful takes a lot of fearlessness. It takes shedding of filters and what are you but your peculiar, offbeat and beautifully bizarre self without any filters? Osheen’s work predominantly focuses on traditional and cultural significance, gender and its intersection with technology and dreams/nightmares as a means of escape.
Dreams attract another artist, Nidhi Iyer from Mumbai. “My art tends to be structured and semiotic, often even unrecognisable at first glance. Everything around us is art and design. The more you delve into it, the more you realise that you, in fact, stem from it.”
In just being its zany self, art ends up being as random as we ourselves are. On being asked about her art, Aditi just says, “Sometimes, even I am not sure what kind of art I work on … mental health, cats and tits!” … “[Through art] You can make a small change in the world step by step and smaller things lead to bigger things.”
Not only does art lead one to bigger things, sometimes, it also brings one back to the smaller, happier things. Mumbai/Delhi-based illustrator and visual artist Santanu Hazarika loved art as a kid. However, as life kicked in, he stopped drawing and instead, went on to try to become an engineer. He gave up engineering to become the first World Doodle Art Champion in 2014 and subsequently also became the judge for the same in 2017. Art also became his rescue while he was struggling with depression. Coming back to art, he started using it as a medium to express all that he was going through. He says, “the vastness and the fluidity of art made me fall in love with it.”
Each of these artists has their own way of using their art as a medium to further self-love. Says Aditi, “Talking about my own brain and its stories has been a step closer to accepting myself because when I feel comfortable enough to accept that I am not perfect, that takes the pressure off.” Aditi hopes that it ends up inspiring other people to talk about themselves and accept themselves for who they are. Nidhi says that self-love is something she is growing into. She continues, “I like representing the state of my mind through art, as subtle as it may seem.”
For any creator who puts out her work on social media, reception and criticism continue to be a factor of anxiety. When Aditi had started out, she was equally affected by response. She concedes that she felt the pressure to pump out a comic every day however basic it was in terms of quality in order to get more traction. This definitely helped her create an audience-base. Over time, however, she learnt to let go of the fear of criticism and now, she creates her content in ways that make her happy.
Nidhi, on the other hand, never quite felt the pressure of obtaining validation but that didn’t stop her from initially feeling scared of putting her content out. She says, “even now, I tend to take a minute, but accepting and loving my own ideas gave me the courage I needed.”
Homegrown also asked the artists about the struggles one has to face in order to keep producing art dipped in self-love. For most of them, the struggles are financial and they cite the importance of maintaining work-life balance since it so happens that one forgets to shut down and for a while at least, take a break from constantly creating. Aditi cites the much dreaded Imposter Syndrome as a struggle she constantly deals with. Santanu also highlights the importance of constant self-development.
Finally, we asked our artists to share that one thing they would say to someone who expresses or wants to express their love through art, and we got the kindest and the most heartwarming responses. Santanu, for one, wrote, “Hard work and originality is what gives you confidence and originality can only be achieved through true acceptance of who you are.”
Loving is difficult, but going back to The Priest from Fleabag, it takes real courage to love, and even more so when it comes to loving your own self. It is always one’s sincere hope that we are able to put all the love that we have inside us out in the world in whatever shape or form we are able to.
Join the conversation and tell us what loving yourself fearlessly means to you! Stand a chance to win your own pair of Converse. Leave a comment on the following Instagram post or DM us a video on our Instagram to stand a chance to win your own pair of Converse!
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Feature image - (L) Santanu Hazarika & (R) Nidhi Iyer
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