Shivangi Kalra is Artlune’s first Artist of the Week. Over on our Instagram account we are promoting up and coming, and hobby artists who tag us in their artwork posts. Shivangi’s oil paint piece (Beam, 2022) impressed and intrigued us. As part of winning Artist of the Week, we invited Shivangi to be featured on Artlune’s blog. We met up over Google Meet to find out more about the artist and her work.
Artist Shivangi Kalra grew up in Delhi, surrounded by her extended family. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins filled her life with sound and colour. Her father’s Punjabi folk music, conversations at family gatherings, her grandmother’s singing; these sounds have all weaved themselves into her work. These memories with her family infuse her oil paintings. Shivangi pays homage to the importance and influence of her family in the dreamlike and intricate details of her paintings: fabrics, faces and environments.
Screaming Turtle, oil paint on canvas (2023)
Shivangi is currently studying in Groningen, a quiet city of around 200,000 people in northern Netherlands. It is in this unassuming city where she is studying a Master of Fine Art in Painting at the Frank Mohr Institute that she has explored and discovered her art style. Before moving to the Netherlands, she completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at College of Art, New Delhi in 2021.
In Groningen, she has found stillness and peace which allows her to process the chaos of her home life through paint. The contrasting calmness of Groningen and the overload of sensations from life in Delhi enrich her work. Trained in classical Indian music from the age of seven, Shivangi draws inspiration from many disciplines including history and literature. She finds inspiration in the portraits of Indian-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, whose paintings are infused with Indian culture.
When she isn’t painting or travelling, Shivangi teaches art to teenagers using a non-traditional approach. She teaches the how of art, but not the why and the what. This way, her students are encouraged to discover their style free of pressure and to gain confidence in their art skills.
Bystanders Of a Fire, oil crayon on paper
During our conversation over Google Meet, Shivangi gave us a glimpse into her colourful sketchbook. Before painting, she sketches her compositions in oil crayons, using unblended and bold strokes of colour to bring her ideas to life. Her sketches start from photographs of her family, mixed with her memories, her surroundings and unexpected elements recalled from her childhood. When Shivangi creates her artworks, unplanned figures, or as she calls them, surprises, make their way onto her canvas to complete her work. Shivangi taps into the hazy world between dreams, memories, and reality to create dreamlike scenes.
Beam, oil paint on canvas (2022)
The viewer, a key part of her work, is taken on a journey in each of Shivangi’s paintings. A first glance is insufficient to fully explore her paintings. In Beam, Shivangi painted her apartment and added elements of past experiences. She weaves together a dreamlike story and brings the viewer on a journey into an alternate reality. An owl glances into a dark room, illuminated only by a strip of light from a partly opened door. A person lies down on the bed, only visible by a foot. These small elements create an aura of intrigue and mystery and beg the viewer to look more closely.
Shivangi describes herself as an observer and she adopts this perspective in her paintings, inviting the viewer to step into her shoes for a moment and view her reality. Her paintings are a blend of memories, photographs, emotions and impressions. Each one has a personal story to tell the viewer and to Shivangi, as she paints.
To see more of Shivangi’s captivating work, head over to her Instagram: @Shivangi_Kalraa
Written by Charlotte Steele
Artlune is more than a gallery, it's a movement to showcase the vibrant voices of emerging and mid-career artists from South Asia.
For more information, contact us at admin@artlune.com or call +91 798 232 5695 (India), +44 743 693 3096 (UK)