Kitschy Kitschy Bang Bang – Oct 2013

The world is turning and things keep moving. The only constant as they say is change. And Change is good.

I want to invite you all to my next show – 18 and 19th of Oct 2013. Details to follow in a subsequent post.

This show has been a long time coming. Somehow time flew from the last ArtByAarohi show in 2010 to now. So much has happened since then. The biggest and best thing of course was and is the birth of ‘The Poonchh Collection‘.  But beyond that I have also been painting large canvases, doing furniture and other interesting things. Somewhere along the way I realized that I had not really touched my ‘Kitsch’ line in a while. I was only taking on commissions to do with the same. But I had a few pieces still lying in my studio storage that I had all but forgotten about.  So I bring those to you in this show. I have steadily been moving on to a wider landscape in my artistic journey. Hopefully more colorful pastures that are much much larger in scale and thought. But before I go into that I want to share my journey thus far with you. Why? because ArtByAarohi the blog completes 5 years in November 2013.
Bear with me- this is a long post. After all, the last five years deserve a special speech!!

I started what has been termed the “Kitsch” phase of my life in 2007. In response to sheer exasperation. Two young children, a husband who traveled all the time and no help at all. There were days I thought I would jump off the balcony or throw everyone and everything else off!!.  And then a chance visit to Ulsoor and Russtle market, a random buy of some aluminum kettles started it all. They were interesting to paint and quick to dry. They forced me to think out of the box. Curved surfaces, indeed new surfaces meant that the old would not work. I also had to figure out what I wanted to paint- the exhaustion I felt or the exuberance that is naturally me.

In the next few posts I want to take you through the journey of a kettle and mine along with it. For now, I want to tell you why I move on.  In 2008, my friend Alok Johri summed up my introduction to kettles as a support surface really well- ‘ I think you paint on kettles and utensils as they are so much a part of your life. So is art and painting. I think in this phase of your life you are just combining the two.’ And he was right.

Over the years I have worked hard on these… they were never a business, they were and are an expression of who I am /was at a given moment in time. They allowed me catharsis when I deeply needed it, joy to express love, principle and happiness. They connected my graphic side to my fine art side. They were something that forced me to simplify my thought process to a surface area that was about a foot and a half on average. But as the years flew by and my children grew up, as I found more time and in fact as I grew up I had so much more to say. I found the surface area allowed to me not enough. So chairs and tables and cupboards came in. And before I knew it, I was working larger surfaces. I leave you with an image of my first kettle in 2007 and the piece that marked the transition on to bigger things….

(The second image of the trunk is taken from Rang Decor – my friend Archana Srinivas’s blog)

The title of this post is inspired by a movie I grew up on- Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!!

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a 1968 British musical film loosely based on Ian Fleming’s novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car. The film’s script is by Roald Dahl and Ken Hughes and its songs by the Sherman Brothers.

Note– I also feel the need to clarify the use of the term ‘Kitsch’ yet again. I don’t feel that it explains the work I do effectively. I actually don’t like that tag associated with my work at all. However as I have explained in another post as well, this tag given to me by the press seems to have stayed. And now it is very difficult if not impossible to get rid off – for a multitude of reasons I might add, from Google search results and listings to press coverage. So I am going to embrace it. But what I would request you, my readers to do, is to not use that tag to define and label all that I do. It would be a disservice to both me and my craft. 🙂