The Art of Change With Rahool Saksena
by Priyanka S
This month, Frankly Speaking Friday happened on a Wednesday. After the success of last month’s session, we just couldn’t wait for another one! Our guest speaker, Rahool Saksena, an Artist of Change, shared his views and experiences on freedom and expression of creativity.
When someone calls themselves an Artist of Change, you are reminded of influential painters and sculptors like Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock, who helped define the revolutionary developments in art history. Saksena is all that and much more.
As an Artist of Change, he transforms every day mediums and materials into unexpected art forms. He strongly believes that his passion and constant quest for transformation forms his core and creates a solid foundation for myriad possibilities of creative expressions.
What do you do when you see distinct forms in twigs and trash? You admire it for a moment and walk away. But not this artist. He digs deeper into the scraps of the world to create soul stirring masterpieces. Sharing his first work of art, he said, “I love crafting and pruning bonsai plants. When one of my cherished plants withered away, I did not have the heart to dispose it. I crafted a lamp shade using pieces from the plant, immortalizing it.” Thus his journey of creating inspiring works of art using discarded materials like bangles, coconut shells, food grains, chilies and much more began.
Over the years, this creative genius has spent substantial time working on commissioned art for several organizations, such as Ford, HSBC, Murugappa, Air Asia, GO IP, and Radio Mirchi among others, designing logos, gifts and much more. He presented his masterpieces and narrated his experiences while creating each piece.
All his masterpieces are anything but simple. They are all well planned after thorough research on the person/organization that has commissioned the work of art and executed to perfection, in his creative style and technique.
Saksena also shared his experience as an Artist-in-Residence at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. His gift to the President was the sculpture of a dancing peacock, Nritya, its crown and beak gold-plated, with feathers of fused glass, set against a backdrop of rain carved into wood, and framed in raw silk; an ode to the Peacock Apartment that he was housed in, while he stayed there.
He claims that his most innovative piece remains the Terrarium, a wide-bottomed bottle that housed within it a thriving garden, fed with light from the lamp above it, and auctioned for The Banyan, an NGO.
Commenting on his masterpiece, he said, “It was just an experiment, I did not know that it would turn out this beautiful. I just pursue art based on one principle and that is ‘Willing to experiment, allowed to fail’. Unless you experiment with different colours, mediums and materials, you will never expand your creativity.”
Although Saksena is an avant-garde artist, he has the passion for reviving age-old crafts that generate employment. He worked on redesigning coconut shells into everything from pen stands to mobile holders, and creating souvenirs from palm leaves, called Pattachitra.
With years of experience in advertising and a penchant for creativity, his mind sees art everywhere and in everything. And that is exactly what we learnt from him – to see things differently and make something out of it using our creativity!