How To Advance Your Career As An Artist ft. Mr. Rahul Basak
(Full interview: https://youtu.be/wcWqjNM76J8)
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.” – Pablo Picasso
Artists are people who communicate their ideas or feelings through their art. They create unique works from their imagination. Artists can be classified into two categories, Fine Artists, and Commercial Artists. Commercial artists take the vision of the client and figure out the best way to portray such a vision to the public. Fine art includes paintings, sculptures, and illustrations, and creation of original works of art for its aesthetic value, rather than for a functional one. The job of fine and craft artists includes developing creative ideas or new methods for making art, using techniques, such as weaving, knitting, glass blowing, painting, drawing, or sculpting and creating sketches or models to guide their work.
In the thirteenth episode of TuriyaTalks Season 4, we had an opportunity to discuss the theme “The Journey of an Artist” with our Guest of Honour Mr. Rahul Basak, the Co-Founder of Amar Canvas, CEO of My Canvas Talk and a documentary photographer. The interview, hosted by Dipshita Chaudhury, encompassed the reminiscence of his journey from being an art enthusiast to establishing Amar Canvas and also mentioned a couple of advises for aspiring artists.
Some insights incorporated from the interview are as follows:
Keeping the inner artist alive isn’t easy. More so for those who need to achieve the fine balance between art and money. Many artists forget their passion and make their peace with a regular job to keep the home fires burning.
But Mr. Rahul Basak and his friend Mr. Amit Kumar Mahishya Das want to change this with Amar Canvas, an online platform that helps artists and handicraft makers sell their work online.
The idea of Amar Canvas was conceived in Hong Kong when he was visiting the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and Mr. Rahul soon connected with Mr. Amit, a friend from his engineering days.
Mr. Basak is also documentary photographer, the projects are done by him was featured in MTV NESCAFE LAB.
He shared how he started his journey as a documentary photographer eight to nine years back by clicking photos on his personal Nokia Lumia phone, because back then DSLR was too expensive to buy. His shots were highly appraised by critics, winning him North Bengal’s Best Photographer Award.
He is also one of the Indian to hold Adobe's Behance Coin.
He also loves to make his presence in the public as a guest speaker. He has spoken on the International platform TEDx (2-Times), as well as on Josh Talk.
My Canvas Talk is also one his start-up project which brings not-so-ordinary individuals from different fields around the globe, with their extraordinary stories to ignite the same passion within you as they hold. These individuals started with something simple, turned their lives around with tremendous effort, astonishing everyone along the way.
The show concluded with an advice for inspiring artists on which he shared one of the suggestions of his teacher. “You might want to be an artist but you will have to feel like a MBA person, you will have to portray yourself, otherwise you and your art will die and nobody would give a damn”, his teacher had told him during his college days. He highlighed the need to choose the perfect genre for one’s work on the basis of interest is really important or one might get lost in the due course.