Making a mark with digital art

Our society seems to be simply obsessed with anything modern, embracing anything that falls in the domain regardless of its merits or demerits. Like everything else, it is the same with art. Our art galleries, of which there is a proliferation in the city, have been highly supportive to modern art but, in instances, they seemed to have discarded their affinity for aesthetics and opted for something that could bring them into the category of the avant-garde jet set.

Fortunately for art lovers, a digitial art exhibition that opened at the Ocean Art Galleries on Saturday, even though based entirely on the most modern of technologies, duly incorporates the aesthetics of traditional art.

The exhibition comprises a collection of 25 works by a young upcoming artist, Farshad Engineer, who seems to have an overwhelming preference for women as the subject of his works.

The images are so well defined and clear, unlike other modern art pieces where a couple of intersecting lines transposed on a circle are supposed to be connotative of a woman. 

The digital techniques ensured that the clarity of the lines not only remains but becomes even more sharply defined.

One of Engineer’s works, titled ‘Vivid Imagination’, is a very sharply defined image of a young woman with a wonderstruck facial expression. 

Her sharp features and expressive eyes are made all the more so through the accuracy that a computer is capable of ensuring. The striking piece could well be termed a masterpiece. 

Then there’s an image of a young girl staring from the balcony of a vintage architectural structure. Titled ‘Anarkali’, the image strikes all the right notes.

Engineer, an art graduate of Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada, seems to be off to a rollicking start in the field of art. Though this was his first solo exhibition, he seems to be well poised on the path to success.

The exhibition, which runs till July 24, is a must-see in that it is based entirely on modern technology, yet it does not incorporate any of those eccentricities of modern art.