At the recent Bloomsbury Festival, there was one artist speaker whose work is so beautiful it makes your heart ache.
Meet Janine Shroff, a Bombay-ite who lives in London. Janine’s work uses bright colours and humour with darker undertones. Androgynous bird characters and humans enact fantasy scenes.
Janine Shroff was born in Bombay, India. She uses mixed media, acrylic and ballpoint-pens on heavy-weight paper. Her early influences were miniature paintings and late 80s comic books like MAD magazine. She completed an M.A. with distinction at Central St. Martin’s College, London, following a B.A. at Camberwell College of Art. She was short-listed for the Mercury Art Prize in 2007.
Shroff is currently collaborating with Kulture Shop, a collective of designers and illustrators in Bombay. She lives and works in London.
The Muse Struck While Growing Up.
Janine Shroff says, “I always enjoyed drawing and comics. From taking art as a subject in school to drawing on my desk, from there to drawing in college in all my note books. I didn't plan to do it as a profession but it turned out that this was the only thing I was particularly good at so my parents encouraged me to go to art school. Even if it wasn't my profession I'd probably still draw. It's something that I find relaxing.”
It Isn’t Easy to Earn a Living as an Artist in India, is it?
Janine explains, “I don't make a living from Illustration; I have a day job in a design agency so I'm not sure how easy it is. I believe some illustrators in India and London manage to illustrate full time and have good success at that. In my experience, illustration tends to be poorly paid and sometimes not paid for at all, even if the companies are large, profitable, global ones. Illustration can be perceived as throw-away or not worth paying for: I find that there is also the expectation that "If you love it, why do you need to get paid?" or they might throw you a bone like "we will give you exposure", but I you can't pay rent or eat with exposure alone. I prefer freelancing outside my work hours, (as many artists do) as it gives me the freedom not to worry about how to get by and also to say no to freelance work I am not particularly interested in.”
The Differences Between Working in Art in India and in the UK.
Janine says she only goes home to Bombay “(For me it will always be 'Bombay' and not Mumbai, that is my home) once a year so my view on this is not that of a local. There are very different thriving artistic scenes in both places; Bombay's artistic environment feels a little more lively, exciting and perhaps a little smaller (but that's an outsider’s perspective). London seems vaster and more varied, but also harder to get in to. Things are scattered across the city: Events, arts shows, performances, so many that I find it hard to keep up. I like London's easy access to art all across the city and I like Bombay's niche.”
Aardman Commission
Recently, the mega successful British media firm, Aardman, gave Janine a lovely commission. She picks up the story.
“Aardman is an UK based animation studio most famously known for the Wallace and Gromit claymation films (which I've always loved). They worked with the British Council India on a collaborative digital project for the 70th anniversary of India's Independence called Saptan Stories (Saptan means 'seven' in Sanskrit). The project was like a digital game of 'consequences', to tell a crowd-sourced story over seven weeks with seven different artists. People could submit what they thought the next part of the story would be, it would be voted on, and the winner's story line would be illustrated by all of us, over seven weeks. So each week it was a different story-line and different illustration. There were three Indian artists, three UK artists and myself, Indian but based in the UK.
There were some lovely results from this collaboration.
“During Saptan stories I produced seven illustrations, as did all the seven artists for the same story. Each of our stories and illustrations can be found online on the Saptan Stories website.
One of the nice things that happened as a result was that I got to see some artists I didn't know of and really enjoyed watching the story unfold in surprising way. It also pushed me to draw faster and challenged me to try a different technique (as sometimes my drawings are very detailed, like miniatures, and take a while to complete.
——————
During Saptan Stories, I got to see some artists I didn’t know of.
—————————
