Smart phone, smart art

There seems to be a network issue and we can’t hear Dilip De over the phone. “Hold on,” he tells us and a minute later, his voice comes out crystal clear. “I have just stepped out of the Jehangir Art Gallery. I couldn’t hear you in there,” he adds.

The gallery in Kala Ghoda is where 24 of De’s works of digital art will be on display till the coming Sunday. With the exhibition titled, Celebration of Love, the businessman and avid art collector has managed to add another prefix to his name — artist. “I am fortunate to have been born in a family of art connoisseurs. When I was barely 12 or 13 years old, I won the Shankar Art Competition in school. So, you can say that art is in my DNA,” he chuckles.  

The pursuit of studies made him neglect that aspect of his life until the age of 26, when he started collecting art and assisting other artists to help them with setting up exhibitions in various art galleries. But his own tryst with art is something that he, in his own words, “stumbled upon” quite accidentally. And he didn’t even need the help of a canvas or paints to do that—his Samsung Galaxy Note was enough. The stylus of the phone became his brush and the tiny screen, his canvas. “The next thing I knew, this old man had managed to master the intricacies of the phone. But there was nobody I could go to ask for assistance, because there is no other living artist in India who has done something like this. This became a new technological breakthrough and I have to learn and grow on my own,” he says.

The one realisation which has struck him after this discovery, is that art is omnipresent. Looking around at the artists sitting outside Jehangir Art Gallery as he speaks to us, De observes, “I’m standing here on the street and there is art all around me. Art is everywhere, in fish markets, on railway stations, in hospitals and even inside your own homes. I don’t need a studio, a canvas or brushes. I just need a quiet place to sit, balance my phone and give expression in an artistic form to what is going on in my mind,” he says.

And now that he has found this form of artistic expression, he wants others to follow suit and make newer discoveries. “India is a young country, aspiring to be the digital capital of the world. Now that I have done it, others should go ahead and create new art and launch a new movement of digital art on phone,” De adds. About his own works at the exhibition, he says, “While reading about important European schools and artists of the 20th Century, surrealism is the one movement that has stayed with me. Now, as I begin my own artistic journey, I can see the sub-conscious influence of surrealist principles in my work as well. Duality and Intrigued would be what I call the ‘figurative’ school whilst Ravishing Kanchenjunga, Mumbai Sky Symphony and Alibag Sky Tango could be called ‘abstract’ surrealism, which is based on the belief that certain forms are better recognised in a superior reality, as they could often be neglected in their everyday manifestation.” All the money collected from the proceeds of the exhibition will go to the Cancer Patients Aid Association.

De hasn’t shared his works with any other artists, apart from Dilip Ranade, who had only words of praise and encouragement for him. “Even Picasso would not have allowed another artist to see his paintings,” De quips. He might not have shown his works to others but we’re sure his wife Shobhaa De must have had something to say when she saw his finished works. “Well, you better ask her,” he laughs and adds, “I think she got a pleasant surprise!”