Illustrating The Mundane

Ranganath Krishnamani is a designer and illustrator in Bagalore India who has worked with Adobe, Oracle, Redbus and as Creative Director for Liquidink Design in India. A skilled hand illustrator, Krishnamani’s work tends towards a more minimalistic, digital finish, largely depicting everyday scenes with special attention paid to the lighting. He used this focus on lighting as the running thread in a recent series of work called, Everyday Musings. Krishnamani used the everyday scenes of Bangalore, the ones that made him stop and think and sparked some kind of inspiration, as the subject of this series. He calls them “mundane everyday happenings…while waiting in the long traffic lights, or by the side of the road” and on his trips throughout Bangalore. He says that over the course of the series, a single source of light, “is intended to add drama and illuminates the subjects.” Each piece is accompanied by a description which gives the viewer an insight into what about the scene in his experience inspired him to illustrate it. One of my favorites, with the included context of the artist, is a piece from the point of view of the backseat passenger in a taxi cab. The driver’s face is obscured so that all the figure really is, is a shadow with an earbud hanging out of it. There is a religious and cultural shrine on the dashboard of the cab and the piece is ascribed to this “vantage point into peoples faith, culture and aesthetic choices from the back seat of a taxi cab.” The pieces are very straightforward in that way, self professed mundane scenes. Their value lies in the point of view of the artist, the meaning ascribed to the scenes by the artist portraying them and how that is communicated to the viewer. It’s a perfect window into everyday life in Bangalore all transmitted with deft skill and perspective.