I started to draw at a very early age, in a “ time when tigers used to smoke”11 I was three years old when I had my first hip surgery and subsequently when was 8 years old, when tigers would drink tea22, metal pins to metal plates. Colouring in books , graphic novels, pen, paper, and day time tv when I was on and off school.
I would draw from my imagination whatever would come to me , where others saw arbitrary lines I saw, solar panels, futuristic cars, hovering pads, and tech only dreamed of.
I continued to draw as a means of escape from physical pain and social disorder. As I grew older I kept my art to myself and only for myself,
In my twenties I traveled across the world seeking out novel ways to learn about art and architecture, from learning Muslim prayer mat designs, to Chinese calligraphy and symbolism, art deeply entwined into history from the largest roman mosaics too roman amphitheater’s and the great wall, my interests were varied and eclectic.
All of it was motivated deeply by Islam and what it meant to me human, our history , our revival and decline as a people and what we could learn from the changing of art , culture and time.
The art that I present to you on this site is intimate and personal, it is my emotional diary And my perspective now how I see the world and nature. I drew these and painted them whilst struggling to walk and see, recently I have continued to pursue the arts and culture despite two heart surgeries, I was born premature with few challenges but overtime the pain turned into a deep desire to create and and share as much love as I could. I would always paint in public so that I could engage fully with whoever wanted to learn or ask questions, it is a means of sharing something deeper than the brain rot and a.I slop we have become accustomed to. ( and because if drew at home I would forget to eat), I would often use my art to practice slowness and deliberation, teaching myself , training myself not to be beholden to the fast pace of the internet . rather to look at the mastery of old , where a painting could take many months or years, my art would be accompanied by writing, structured English, poetry and 2 science fiction novels, writing would help me think and drawing would help me to see, a river with two streams.
My primary tool is an architectural pen that is 1/10 of millimeter, which is so fine that I would have to trance out or meditate in order to to draw accurately, never using a pencil, keeping everything as true as possible. Requiring the entire body to be calm and in tune with each line. Focusing on nothing but the line at hand. The world would blur and the spatial boundaries between distant realities conflated.
Automatic surrealism , allowing the pen to move and flow, enables us to move through differing realities and ideas, a blank of piece of paper to an artist can be anything from, a new novel to a new painting. It’s growth and inward travel were you can time travel without having to leave your home.
This art of mine is about one subject, nature. And what it alludes in regards to the Divine .
It’s visual poetry , and an abstraction of the very repeated patterns we see in nature and our universe.
The way a constellation looks like a jellyfish, lungs which look like trees, roots which look like vines, and veins, road maps which look like circuit boards, broken glass, stained glass, and animal print, atoms , galaxies, celestial bodies, underwater creatures and cells and minutiae, I have spent many nights studying cellular biology, black holes and pop culture aesthetics, as well as philosophy and a broader ranger of culture, most importantly I encourage every artist to read and then read some more. As a software engineer, I discovered art and computer programming are in someways the same subject, it’s process and more process, layers of abstraction upon layers of abstraction, where learning one benefited the other.
This is a reflection on how vast symmetry in nature and repeated patterns which allude to a higher power.
Different words and concepts for the same basic geometric shapes give rise to lateral thinking, new connections and insights, and a linguistic flexibility that forms from a intellectual agility that births creative visions and novel problem solving techniques.
Art isn’t a luxury its a necessity which enriches daily life. Through the act of making it we become present, purposeful and soothed. The biggest project any artist truly works on is themselves, their vision of the world, man and life.
I’m writing this whilst editing my novel, and preparing for my first major exhibit and recovering from heart surgery, we do our best work when we are slaying dragons, our pens are swords and we slay monsters so others have the courage to slay theirs.
We are all artists,
Imran M Raja
The tiger who liked to draw 33