Illustrator Gautami Reddy On Finding Joy & Purpose In Uncertain Times

"I wasn't consciously trying to become an artist," says Gautami Reddy. She fell into it the way most honest things happen, sideways, and a little by accident. Before the sketchbooks and the "how to" comics that now circulate widely online (including a piece on artificial intelligence that ran in The Hindu), she was a communications professional, documenting the lives and practices of contemporary artists for a living.

Reddy grew up in Delhi, studying in Lady Sri Ram College, her path into art wasn't a straight line from art school to studio, in fact, she doesn't have an art-school background at all. Instead, her artistry was assembled from fragments, with a childhood spent colouring, a professional life spent around galleries and art fairs, and a pandemic-era online workshop with the artist Gagan Singh that, in her words, "cracked my brain open." Whatever materials she had lying around, loose paper, twenty-rupee sketchbooks, became the surface she returned to, again and again, until drawing turned into a daily practice and Singh turned into one of her closest friends and mentors.

She describes being surrounded by trained artists for years and dismissing her own drawing as a private hobby, something she made for herself, and occasionally gave away to her friends and family as gifts. It was only through the accumulation of small and honest pages that she began to recognise her emotional voice as something distinct from the professional one people already knew her for.

And that very honesty is what runs through her practice. Reddy is wary of the language the art world often uses to keep people out with its jargon and exclusivity, because she spent years working inside institutions trying to do the opposite by making art accessible, local, and less intimidating. She talks about how over her education and experience working in art institutions and galleries she figured that the most exciting part of art never really happened inside the four walls of a gallery,"I realised that the best part of the art world is actually what happens at people's own desks and in their drawing rooms, not just the output you see in galleries and fairs."

Her comics, built around "how to" questions, are a continuation of that instinct. She's careful to distinguish "how" from "why." The "why" questions about purpose, about meaning, about democracy or artificial intelligence are vast and often bottomless. The "how" questions, by contrast, are actionable. “How is taking on the bigger question by finding a way to, like, action something? It's giving you a method. So, which is why I feel like I try to invent a method that I feel is honest. Because I only have to live it. I can't be talking about anything that I do. So maybe there's people who just resonated with it because there's a sense of honesty in how things are not that hard to do, you know, if you set out to do them.”

Talking about how she first started making these how-to 'guides', Reddy points out that they were born out of her own frustration of having adulthood be thrust upon her. The general anxiety and apprehensions of not knowing how to tackle a big, real world problem led to her sketching her first guide on a Post-It. "Sitting in the office, I started answering "how to" questions, how to find purpose in life, how to say no politely, and so on, first on Post-its, and eventually on the iPad, or in notebooks."

Reddy pushes against the idea that a person's job should be the primary container for their sense of self, arguing instead for cultivating something, a hobby, a practice, a form of play, that exists purely for its own sake, without an audience or a market attached. She talks about rediscovering play in her own life through drawing only for herself sustained for months and years now. And as someone, who finds it exceedingly difficult to distinguish my work from my very sense of self, Reddy's candidness that this kind of pursuit often has to be built sometimes without any show , even invisibly, before it can hold any weight, was genuinely inspiring.

Underneath all of it is a belief in agency as something practiced day in and day out in different ways and forms possible. Through disagreement with a parent over dinner or choosing to answer a hard question badly rather than not at all or picking up a pen with no formal training and deciding that counts. Reddy chooses not to offer certainty, because nobody can really do that. What she offers instead is a method for diving into the uncertainty without being flattened by it, and by being curious and playful about it.

Follow Gautami Reddy on Instagram.

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