Hello everyone! I hope that you are all doing well and have had a great semester thus far! After some careful consideration and introspection, I present to you my new and improved column: The Indian Artist, Revamped with Riya Aggarwal! This column will maintain the same framework as my old column, stayed rooted in my culture and heritage. However, this time, I am expanding beyond just my Hindu culture. I wanted to integrate my passion for art with the other fields of study that I am interested in. As some of you may know, I am currently pursuing a career in medicine, majoring in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology with a double minor in Art & Design and Sociology of Health & Medicine on the pre-med track. Perhaps even more than my art, this is an large part of my life. I spend most of my time involved in STEM coursework, biomedical engineering research, and working at the U of M Hospital. As I get closer and closer to my medical school journey, I wanted to include more of myself, outside of just my culture, into my posts.
My posts last semester started feeling a bit uninspired so I wanted to “revamp” my column. I hope to open up discussion even further into the worlds of medicine, ethics, and culture with an emphasis on art, design, and innovation. I officially invite you all to The Indian Artist, Revamped! I am truly so excited to share even more of my passions with you all. This column has been an incredible opportunity for me throughout the past two years and I look forward to the next two!
I will be posting weekly on Mondays evenings this year. Please feel free to reach out to me or comment if you have any questions, concerns, or thoughts!
Until next Monday,
Riya
Instagram: @riya_aggarwal.art
Portfolio: https://theindianartist.weebly.com/
Hanuman Jayanti celebrates the birthday of Hanuman and fell on Saturday, April 16th this year. Hanuman was the son of Kesari and Anjana. He was well-known for his unwavering selflessness, service, and devotion to Lord Rama and his family, thinking of nothing else but their comfort and well-being.
The majority of the first few weeks of the course was working exclusively with simple shapes (conical forms, ellipses, rectilinear planes, etc.), learning about perspective and foreshortening, and introducing composition. Nothing was new to me and I was quite comfortable with all of the concepts. However, I do think that I have learned how to be a little looser with my rendering. As someone who has done tightly rendered conceptual art for as long as I can remember, it was difficult to learn how to convey ideas with fewer strokes and details. We were encouraged to be brief with the rendering stages of our projects, and I truly believe this has helped me to become more perceptive of what details and forms are necessary to convey ideas to a viewer. This has aided me in forming a deeper relationship with my own art.
Good afternoon everybody! I hope that you all are doing well! I had a wonderful weekend that I wanted to share with you all. Yesterday was Holi, the Festival of Colors, my absolutely favorite Hindu festival. We all get together, wear white, and play tag with colorful powder, adorning each other in beautiful hues of pink, orange, yellow, blue, red, and more. If you are interested in reading more about Holi check out my post 
In this post, I wanted to share something else besides Holi. A few weeks back, I was presented with a beautiful opportunity. I was hired by the Ypsilanti Public Library to demonstrate and teach young kids and families how to make Rangoli. Rangoli is the art of adorning pavements and house floors with colored powder or fine colored sand. Traditionally, during holidays, homes and temples are decorated with beautiful mandalas. Generally, natural and pure products are used to create these beautiful designs. When I did Rangoli this time, I used fine colored sand in squeeze bottles to make intricate designs. We decided this could be the best form of creating the Rangoli because it is easy to handle by children.
This was a really wonderful day. I demonstrated how Rangoli is made, creating original designs on the floor of the library. Kids watched and then were allowed to go wild, using the bright colors to create their own abstract and wonderful creations. The kids, of all ages ranging from toddlers to pre-teens, were very sweet, loved learning about the history of Rangoli, and created their own wonderful art!