Mumbai artist's illustrations on anxiety creates ripples on foreign shores

Pranita Kocharekar (24) did not think that her frank but light-hearted illustrations on anxiety in the young will touch a chord with a lot of people. She was wrong. The young freelance artist found her Instagram and Facebook posts about her project 'Is That you?' on axiety levels being shared widely.

What was more, several wrote back to her, thanking her for talking about mental health. "One young girl wrote to me to say that she used the illustrations to explain to her parents what she was going through," said Pranita, who studied at the Rachana Sansad college in Mumbai.

"I have been working on personal projects that help me explore various art styles. For this particular project, I went back to using water colours," Pranita explained. While most of the time she works on projects for her clients, she has decided to do one project every year for her personal satisfaction.

'Is That you' project happened out of the blue for Pranita, who found herself growing overly anxious by the day. When she spoke about the subject to her friends and researched more, she found that it was fairly common.

"Anxiety is an actual mental illness. I wanted to put down the incidents that me and my friends suffered from and I wanted people to know that they are not alone," Pranita said, adding that while the subject was a serious one, she decided to take a humorous approach to it.

While it took a month's time to work on the illustrations, Pranita has grabbed eyeballs of international press as well as lifestyle magazines after this project. She was surprised by the positive reception of the topic as mental illness is not something seen as a lifestyle issue.

This is not the first time she has tried to do something different. In 2014, she worked on a series of postcards that had simple, frank one-line messages. She also worked on a project that dealt with body issues. "I created a whale that travels from the ocean to the city and wrote a series of short stories on Instagram. While nature welcomed the whale, people in the cities were found to be very mean," she said.

In the past, she has also worked on the project 'Taxi Fabric', wherein she designed colourful interiors for taxi drivers.

While the 'Is That You' project has come to an end, she said, "There is so much to talk about when it comes to the issue of mental health. I would love to explore it further."