Freebirds Stories
A Creative Experience With Artists of Indie Creator's Adda

Divya Ramachandran - a missionary with a paintbrush as she calls herself determined not just to make public spaces livelier but also impact the lives of young people through art. An engineer turned artist Divya completed her Master’s in Design from Milan’s Domus Academy in 2012 and began her teaching career at Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology on returning to Bengaluru. Her journey is a parallel one from learning art to teaching it professionally. During the course of the interaction with her, I found out many minute aspects of how art can be meticulously imbibed in the form of storytelling. She displayed some of her graffiti works which perfectly portraits the essence of her state with the use of vibrant colours and sentiments pouring on canvas. Simply to put as thoughts into action. Some of her best works which can be sited is the Happy Wall Project where Divya along with her team started beautifying public spaces and it opened doors to creativity in the city of Bangalore and she was appreciated for the initiative. As Divya beautifully mentioned that her love for pen and paper inscribing her thoughts to her sketches is what drove her to follow her passion. She believes that consistency is the key which is well reflected in her art be it graffiti, portraits or paintings emoting the creative bent of mind. Initially she started of her professional career at one of the prestigious companies as an engineer but gradually she realized that art is what makes her the most happy and her inclination towards her art made her one of the successful creators who shared her journey globally in platforms like Ted Talk as a speaker.

Another story from the northeastern part of the country is of Khairul Bachaar an entrepreneur, art enthusiast who believes that art is not just a medium of expression but an emerging space of communication. Khairul is a visual artist and educator who did his masters in VFX and animation from AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. Having more than ten years experience in the field of visual art he worked with India's Animation Industry (Green Gold Animation Pvt. Ltd.) including Netflix Original web series, Amazon Prime and International projects like Manga (Ninja Hattori). Lastly worked as a faculty member at Arena Animation, Imphal. Khairul believes that coming from north eastern part of the country there is no dearth of talent but only lack of opportunity and connectivity is what lagging behind to compete with the national counterpart. Hence he tried to make the best use of the available resources to create communication through art. When he started off his career as a 9 to 5 job regime he felt that his creativity is losing within closed spaces and so one fine day he picked up his brush and a little bit of courage to start off his own venture O’Hen Art Studio in the year 2020 and there was no looking back since then. He started creating art based products through movies, advertising, new media and social media to establish connectivity with the masses. Both of them showcased some of their best artworks from sketches to oil paintings, flipbooks to soft pastels each of them portraying stories, feelings from their land. One of the reflections which I realized is that any aspirant of art needs to realize and create their own niches to make art a language to reach the desired lovers and admirers. There are many undergraduate and diploma courses are available in design, visual art which can hone one’s skills of art. But in order to create content on any desired skills, medium one needs to be consistent and true to their work. There are no shortcuts to the road of success. The stories of Divya and Khairul perfectly sums up that one needs to keep challenging and make oneself better each day with perseverance, practice and dedication in whichever field one chooses to go in life. We can fail, we can make wrong decisions but each lesson will make us a better person to strive perfection. That’s originality of every creator and their universe.