Stories faces tell

Aditya Narula dabbled in various vocations before he realized portraiture was the best way to express the fascinating complexities of the people he encountered along the way

How has formal education influenced your career?

AN: Being largely self-taught, it would be easy for me to say that my formal education had no part to play. The truth is quite to the contrary. My schooling years saw me in a hostel in Dehradun. The campus was overflowing with art. The collection comprised donations by accomplished alumni as well as exemplary works by the students. In college, I studied architecture - it was a paradigm shift where visual expression was the preferred form over all else. It saw me using my hand a lot more and the casual doodles of my younger years needed formalizing into something resembling language. I came to understand design as a process. As I began exploring drawing for my personal reasons, outside of the classroom, I found that I had a veritable ocean of techniques to choose from. My artworks are often built up carefully layer by layer. I find myself instinctively leaning towards this layered approach and the visualization of each layer/step towards the composite whole, even untried ones, comes to me easily.

What drew you to portraiture?

AN: I'm not sure when my leanings toward portraiture began. Perhaps at some level, it stems from being an introverted kid, and the associated social ineptitude that came with it. Drawing became an attempt to bridge my frustrating lack of understanding as well as curiosity and fascination with my peers.

Personally and intellectually, I find realism - which to me is quite different from hyper-realism - in portraiture one of the most challenging and potentially expressive forms of art. Perhaps what drew me is also that portraiture is accessible as a form, and doesn't intimidate the viewer.