It’s high time the spotlight shone on the lesser known and lesser appreciated artists!
Throwing a gala of a fest to celebrate and acknowledge their work The Indie Comix Fest is back with its third edition on the December 2. With an aim to provide a platform for self published comic artistes and illustrators who create comics on small scale, the fest is set to take the city by storm.
In conversation with the organiser, Amitabh Kumar, faculty at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, and an artist himself, we got a peep into what they have planned for the audience and participants. “The fest allows a platform for an ecosystem to emerge for the makers as well as ensures a diverse and growing readership of graphic sequential form. We hope that such attempts will accelerate the possibility of varied kinds of graphic content to independently sustain themselves. The scene right now has no experts and allows for a common ground of experiments and adventures where first time graphic artists can invent their own ways of finding their public. Also it lays the foundation of a practice that includes the responsibility of making ones work public.”
Artists who will be presenting their works at the fest open up to us...
Rahil Mohsin who will be presenting three books; The Big Sheep, Kiss Kiss Blam Blam, and Blame it on Rahil says, “Unfortunately, drawing for a living isn’t considered a serious profession. I’ve had my share of being judged for the career choices I’ve made, but this is something that used to bother me earlier on in my career. It’s been eight years now and it’s a pretty long time to develop a thick skin.”
Bharath Murthy, an artist who draws inspiration, for the fact that they transformed the comics medium into a literary form capable of expressing the complexities of our societies says, “ The aim of a fest as such should be to enable more and more people to express themselves freely in the comics form and to create a culture of reading comics. We particularly want to encourage more women creators and readers. I will be presenting Slice-of-life, autobiography, at the festival and I really look forward to the experience.”
Madhuvanthi Mohan who goes by the name Something Sketchy, sees art and comics as a great way to bring about a change in the society we live in. She says, “I used to be a copywriter in advertising for three years in Mumbai before I quit to pursue illustration, creative entrepreneurship and freelancing fulltime. I missed being around creative people as I was working on my own, and so I started an illustrators group where I bring the Indian illustrator community together for talks, workshops, art shows and intimate informal gatherings for us to connect and support each other. I guess being a woman artist informs and seeps into the things we do in some way or the other. It’s great that so many female artists, and some male artists are using their unique voices to talk about #metoo and feminism and really doing their part to spread awareness and change toxic patterns, and I hope to contribute to that too. Art is such a powerful tool in bringing about change.”
