Faisal’s Art
I have always enjoyed drawing, sketching, and painting. My earliest memory is of a cow I drew when I was in first grade, that caught the attention of my family. It wasn’t until a 10th-grade art class, though when I discovered that I had a knack for good observation and a way with colors on a canvas. Upper division high school is super busy in India and it wasn’t until sophomore year in undergrad that I picked up a canvas again. I made a couple of amateurish paintings back then and didn’t draw anything substantial until I started working after grad school.
After a hiatus of several years in 2008, inspiration struck during a moment of personal introspection, and I picked up oil painting once again and started with Alaskan Birch. A short while later, I started volunteering as an illustrator for Sierra Club Silicon Valley chapter’s newsletter, The Loma Prietan. This gave me several opportunities and more importantly, deadlines, to illustrate things. While they needed simple illustrations, I used these requests as excuses to do oils on canvas and then send them photos of the paintings to be published in the newsletter. The California Mountain Lion, Dolphin, and Clair Tappan Lodge are a few examples.
More recently, I have begun experimenting with digital mixed media. My two most recent works were first conceptualized and drawn on an iPad in the Procreate app using the Apple Pencil. I then printed the base on canvas paper at Fedex Office and then layered Oils and Acrylics on the canvas. My 2021 pandemic project – “Pink Morning in Yosemite” is one such work (Oils on a 24″x36″ canvas).
Lately I have been experimenting with Impressionism – my two Spring 2024 paintings of California Superbloom and Chicago Waterfront Twilight are such examples.