Because blank is boring

Imagine a wall with an outer space theme. It has humans and pets in spacesuits floating around in the night sky. This is one of the many illustrations created by Abhinav Kafare — a 26-year-old illustrator from Mumbai. In keeping with our city’s colourful exteriors, he has been jazzing up blank walls with his quirky illustrations and artwork; his work adorns various schools in the outskirts of Maharashtra and can even find a home on your bedroom walls.

A graduate in fine arts from LS Raheja School of Art, Abhinav had been dabbling with various visual mediums before finally choosing walls as his canvas, “When I graduated from college, I did advertising and later was exploring various visual mediums. Since my college days, I would paint at home,” says Abhinav, who never had the luxury of a studio.

It was only during his extensive travels to different parts of the country that he started thinking about the concept of wall art and street painting, “I would see blank walls, and as an artist, this would disturb me and make me think about art and its relation to ordinary people. Wall art and street painting were ways through which I think we can communicate best with the locals,” he says.

Street-art and wall painting happened to him because plain walls, he feels, are a waste of space, “Why leave something empty, when beautiful artworks can be designed on it,” he says.

Art also has a lot to do with people and their connectivity, Abhinav shares a story, “I was in Baramati recently and chief of the village wanted me to paint their school. The school with whitewashed walls gave me a scope to paint something amazing. The chief later called me to say that students who once missed classes were now attending them because their school now looked so pretty. The satisfaction one gets when the work actually creates an impact is amazing,” he says.

Pointing to an artwork he made on a truck, Abhinav says that in the day and age of cell phones, one should be able to communicate with art simply by looking around. “People should at least look at the walls and think,” says Abhinav, who works with a team of two people and uses everything from acrylic colours to spray paints to create his artworks.