Hello, my name is Pulkit Kamal. I am a graphic designer and I make artworks in Photoshop under the name of @artofpolka.
For last 8 months, I've been making surreal and dreamy artworks from the images that are available under CC0 license. I started doing it as a therapy for my melancholia and now, I often collaborate with people, lending their stories, poems and incidents and making dreamy artworks out of them and sometimes I use my own poems from my novel that I had written.
These are some of my works I've made wholeheartedly, if you find time, please go through them.
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Heer
For the longest time, I had been spending time being someone rather than identifying who I really am. And to tell you the truth, it felt good and sometimes, really really good. I was comfortable being someone, it felt like I was wearing a use and throw mask. It was simple, I’d meet someone or maybe see someone on screen, get inspired by them and imitate them. For couple of hours or maybe for a day, or maybe till the effect of the mask wears off. I don’t care what they eat, but I’d closely observe how they eat, how they hold the fork when they are chewing, up or down! My mind would question everything about them and my eyes would analyse every action of theirs’ closely, and once I am done making their mould in my head, I’d then go to somewhere alone and come out as a different person. I’d be careful so that I don’t exactly look like their clone, but I used to do that neatly. I’d steal their identity and then throw it somewhere never to be found again. Now, I don't know anyone who does that, but last year, while chatting with someone on the internet, I couldn’t answer their question of ‘Tell me something about yourself?’ /
And although I kept writing and deleting my answers for almost 15 odd minutes, I had no answer whatsoever. Funny, but when I realised how deep of a question for an answer so simple it was, my system crashed in front of my eyes, unable to show a stimuli, I then again looked for someone’s face to steal. I wanted to get close to prove without realising how far I was from seeing myself. /
No one around. /
No imitation to take. /
Sure, I've hurt and lied to a lot of people in my lifetime for which I shouldn't be forgiven, but hurting and lying to myself, everyday, without remorse or guilt, that's a punishment that has no bail. Human after all, aren't we? /
Starting this year after learning from the self inflicted harm, I've learnt the most important lesson of 'being yourself' while being proud of it at every thing you do. I'm not a philosopher and this is not a philosophy. This is a fragmented realisation that hit me at a very precise time in life which I will never regret.
I really thought this was something that was unique to only me! The only difference is, I don't really put a lot of thought into it, I notice i'm doing this and I feel it's because of my flaws, I am trying to look like the other persons' strenghts and put them up like a picture or story in the place of my flaws. It sometimes feels like a defense mechanism but mostly, it makes me feel whole. I always talk about being our original selves, and how if everyone did that, we would all be unique, bringing way more to the table and solving many more problems in different ways. How it could change the world if everyone just stopped trying to supplement and fit into molds (masks of normalcy that make them comfortable or feel better) and embrace the uniqueness that people around them may laugh at... I believe I advocate for that not just because imagining it on a world scale would lead to way more positivity, acceptence and possilby a better world but for myself, for all of those reasons. 111-5990e1...c07778.jpg
Bhola
I know in my head, the voices are real and they won't stop singing the melancholy of your lullaby.
This is how I see all my new ideas escaping me while I just go through the motions, focusing on other things besides drawing. Great work.
Laura
It was all dust and fire before you and I were here. The scene was lonely, unbuilt and naked as the morning sun lighting the tip of your eyes. Then we both came along, we fell on the earth like a burning comet from a distant star. And still, I can't forget your touch and still I don't want to be an inch away from the tip of your ice cold fingers. You were an evermore. You were the bowl in which my soul swam.
Melinda
Her floating hair constricted my breath into an overly surreal feel, a flawless extravaganza; she was the planet without moon, the sun bathing in the universal light, I was again falling into my renowned stage of trance. Her floating soul suddenly turned her face at me, stunned I looked at my other part but he was long gone, I turned my head to see her and saw her standing inches away from me. She faintly looked at me and smiled and I fainted after losing myself to life again.
Some of your work, I can't help fighting with my inner self as to whether I like the art or the poem... I will choose to love anything that I originally do! I do feel like I understand your soul, as much as few can without ever meeting. One of the hardest things to do is to share your soul with the world in a way to which some can really make it out.
Placebo
I wandered and wandered alone to seek of what I couldn’t find, I was in a stuck in a state of my own misconceptions, thoughts and in a never ending fight with my own senses. I could fall and never think of coming back again. This loneliness has pitched so deep itself in me that I couldn’t think of what was right or what was wrong. I could stare at the coiled horizon with my cataract vision for miles till I fall into pieces and still be unable to think of anything else than her. /
I felt as religious as a summer breeze smashing the winds of our past scattering of whom I had idolized and whom I have detached from my life.
Darlene
Your name is on my lips. Always, that it has become the first syllable of my birth and an epitaph on the treacherous stone floating above my girth. I look for you like a soul withering close to your eyes and I chant your name like you are the last goddess from the deadless river of time. These northern winds never lied to me, but why do they say you're just away for a while? /
It doesn't bloom like it used to, the water doesn't call you name anymore, o' the light of north, you've become the river that is dry to me.
Puneet
Minutes were passing by but they didn’t turn into hours, the slow music from my laptop tried to fold my apathy into discussed flavours of my romanticism and lunacy, just like a blind shot of warmth on my cold skin, troubled I was dwindling and I couldn’t hold my back. I looked around at my studio, only her bits of invigorating scent were left – just like her absence and even being unable to reconcile, it just painted my colourless silhouette in a blank frame of solitude without a canvas.
Aara
The weight of my weapons /
My war on you /
Is heavier than than the scars I received in battle /
How do you I tell you my love? /
You are with a monster. /
Rock me slowly in your arms /
Hoping one day I will cry so hard /
Your soft heart will take it all /
Only if you knew, /
my tears are like knives /
They'll cut you so bad /
You'll learn to believe lies /
- Aara
Grahan
We both had levitated far above into the deep dark starry space; around her I saw a shimmering nebula bursting all the colours from her pale white skin. I grabbed her in the absolute nothingness of the never ending space. Our bodies slowly started melting by each other’s heat and then abruptly got submerged into each other leaving an aura of undefined yet newly composed hue; by the time we both could realise, we were a single entity written down in a unified celestial spectre of tribune. We floated and swam in the compressing dust of broken stars, for ours was a love that gave meaning to the heart among hearts. I heard her voice singing the song of birth at the surreal extremity of impeccable singularity; we then finally took everything in like a new found black hole touched by the last poisoned points of our minds.
Pret
I felt as religious as a summer breeze smashing the winds of our past scattering of whom I had idolized and whom I have detached from my life.
This line just gutted me: "It doesn't bloom like it used to, the water doesn't call you name anymore, o' the light of north, you've become the river that is dry to me." I would cry an ocean of tears to fill the river to overflowing. How can I make things better for you when I cannot even better myself? Salt has value until you are thirsty - and I fear that in your thirst you'd curse me while I wept.
Almost There
She had ripped every meaning of time, space and life apart in front of me and yet I felt she was scared of something, something I could never know and help her to deal with. We opened our mouths to amalgamate the sanctity of the universes within us, I got sucked into hers’ and she got sucked into mine. All my emotions transcended into a neutrality of superb lucidity, I was there but I didn’t know what to look for. She was the thin fabric of epiphany that covered my inexistent body like a cocoon inside a hearse.We were dissolved into the thin inflatable membrane of insatiable desires and reached to a point of no return as we travelled from a point of no embark.
Bhrama
My home burnt itself on the rusted stars of our past. Was it you or was it your idea I loved, I still don't know and maybe I'd never want to know. Can we be again the the stranger we used to be?
Ahana
I was in a outlandish state, my vision grew blurry as I broke the walls of my numbing pain. Her fainting smile was like an epitome of that enigmatic brief journey from death to birth and her vision was like a refraction of a white light passing through many newborn prisms. In this blinding light, when the world is high, I am alone and comfortably drunk in her name.
Sunieta
Aren't we all dancing to the tunes we wish we could sing?
(For Sunieta) I came to you a wounded dove, so wild eyed with fear and served up to you in a basket of barbed wire. You saw the me who hid inside the fevered dove. Sanctuary. So sweet a relief, you poured hopes and dreams over me washing away the fainting pain. A tear whispered "Farewell" as a hawk soared free.
Displacement
Purnima
We were the sight of their destruction. The uncomfortable truth of disaster. The pain of joy in their eyes and the shock of lightning in their eyes. I was the hunger and you were their thirst. I was the water and you were the moon. It was you who put ache in my life and it was you who were the drug to my life. And then you left me in the great forlorn woods of Ikelhaze where the light never shone and the wind never blew. For years I walked alone to look for you, how did we part our ways when we were meant to be one?
Maya
I was deliberately withering down lose; moments later I was lost, knotted off, turning away from this celestial reality, a place where I could see her, be with her, hold her and never let go. A place of no-man, a place of the unknown.
Jhonny
Nita
Never had it happen before, never did I feel such a wreaking desire inside of me. I couldn’t sleep; this sudden hollowness was prolonging its surreal labour of rinsing every other thought I could think of. It felt like I was walking on a thin rope with burning ends, in a delicate state of losing my only being left; If only I could insist on her presence and even if I try to summon up her of what I could remember, her moving silhouette was summarising my grounds and reasons of my continuation.
Drifters
I saw my death and birth, a necessary one, the only one you’d last to see. I was scared; I felt certain nervousness in tomorrow’s event of, if I’ll ever see her again? ‘I was brought down on my knees before even I could analyse my own senses; I could see myself painting on a division of Horizons.’ Inside my mind, thick clouds of haze were forming, the darkness which danced around my limitlessness was staring at me from the very bounds of inconspicuous truth. I lowered down my head and gave her a side note into her somnolent eyes; ‘I felt a sudden urge to consume her, as if, if I leave her, everything would end. I was walking in absentia, there was a soul entering and leaving in a motion unknown, my fingers were dancing onto each other’s plane; and a certain shiver was flowing and appearing in a hallucinating path down my spine in a strict narrowness of ever changing degrees.’
Pitch
Nakedness up in the eyes, flooded at the verge of a broken dam, too many hearts will break and bleed, while watching birds migrating in a migraine of my woman, are you sane, ‘No, I am insane and my poles are purging in a hole called avoid my name,’ your tears drown, my art is down, call me renowned, buy me a life and I want this, that and whole world to see society is strange, is the blood yet shed, they won’t regret, but you’ll pick me up and your daughter up, drunk on a street compounded with fuck breeds, are you there, are you – you, are you true?
Shanti
Her head formed an aureole of brilliant light above her fragile skull, her eyes turned into darkest shade of night, a kind of colour mankind has never ever seen. The sky glowed purple, and after exact eight seconds, the thunder had hit the water and had turned everything feral; the sound of thunder accentuated my hollowness and filled it with new born lotuses which came out in fossilised form, thus I was born again.
Aasiyah
I was greyed out; my mind had shifted its burden to this weakened heart which was on the verge of nailing its counted pumps left to breathe in this body of mine. I felt cursed and blessed in a morning where I could charm my way to appreciate its beauty in an everlasting scene. As I started walking, the echoes of my steps were forming their gust, almost engulfing everything coming on its way. She was sitting deep inside the clouds of my meditation.
Fargo
A frail body /
Holding itself together /
In a field /
Of a hundred miles /
A lone figure /
Among long blades of grass /
That quivered like your lips. /
Your long hair, /
Flowing in the breeze of a million sighs. /
Across your wishful face. /
And your eyes, /
The almond shaped reflections /
Of red autumn trees on the lake. /
Only if I could take /
the blue out of your heart /
And paint the sky again. /
- Aara
Bianca
It took me a long time to realize that you can do everything right and still end up unhappy. You can say all of the right things, do exactly as you are told, follow in the footsteps of all the people who swore by their success and their strategy surrounding it, and you can still end up displaced — because you didn’t ever choose to simply listen to yourself. The best thing I ever did for myself was simply listen to what I actually wanted. I drowned out the guidelines, the advice, the 'shoulds.' And I messed up. I made mistakes that I’ll never forget. I hurt people I loved, and I got hurt. See, self discovery isn’t this comfortable, miraculous thing. It can get ugly, it can get confusing. It's gritty, it's hard. It’s difficult to confront yourself sometimes, it's difficult to be the person who does things differently, who doesn’t settle. But it's the greatest gift you will ever give yourself. It will push you towards figuring out what your own personal version of happiness looks like; and when you grow on your own terms, when you figure out what actually matters to you, and when you carve out your own path, you live on your own terms. You love on your own terms. You become the person you have always wanted to be, rather than the person you were always told to be, and that is beautiful. Because when it comes down to it — life is about making yourself proud on your own terms. It’s about finding a happiness that works for you. —@Rainbowsalt
Vik
I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t act to anything. My feet were shivering and my mind, soul and heart were as numb as the silent northern woods of the Black Forest, and it was a condition turned to a degree of utter and copious deliverance of uninvited pain. Like a sheet of monstrous sadness covered every inch of my skin.
Sorrow
I am ranking in the garden of this unfounded null. /
‘A feeling, no one has ever described to me. It almost felt like I was rupturing my own tendons upon which I hold my vision and hang my soul on. Just like that, she winked and encumbered me in a never-ending delirium of my own existence. She crossed her legs and looked into my lifeless eyes for a brief jiffy. ‘I felt being consumed, I was aghast in a stance of owning her, I was surpassing the worldly pleasures and materials I own to throw. I belong to her now.’ /
I saw her with a delight, her skin shone like a polished ivory; her benevolent legs were magnificent on its own. Her postured thighs, orchestrated to enslave any living or dead, no morals I could think of, I was short of words, she made me a wanton again.
Never Ending Thoughts
The storm, your absence – I live surprised in the dismay of ill-fated occurrences which tenaciously shrouds my hope in a mantle of poisonous extravagance, I breathe yet I don’t feel alive, and when I feel alive, I don’t get to know why? I feel being on board of an old wooden ship with holes in its surface touching the inch think sea surface, it withers me, sinks my soul, but it doesn’t deliver me anywhere. I am still living in it and looking out from the passage meant to be leading on for you. As far as my deplorable memory could recall, it recommends me that there is a man looking at his will to take and liberate everything which once had a meaning.
Nita
So I am now falling, falling into the sky, this deep hole, a hole in this life. /
Who has my time? Who holds my fate? I am in a maelstrom of madness living aimlessly in a guilt of love today. /
Where is my silence, oh! they took that in the hymn once I prayed? Inane, is it me? Is it the time for me to comprehend? /
My visualization are biased and unfree, my mean thoughts strayed into the wilderness of what I call not so green. /
Disobedience is in my bowl, colossal and out of reach. What is the meaning then? I guess the meaning was to demean. /
Entered in this hole, a sangfroid feel floating inside. Is it my calm is not in place? or what I see was erased by time? /
I am now consumed, I am not sure what do you call a life. If there is some left, it will be oblivious in it's own eyes.
Polka
I floated blank in sheer black space; a tear fell from my eye which alienated me into an ocean splashing its wildest waves onto me, it didn’t flow away and neither did it pull me down. I was slipping into deformed shapes of object around me as I turned my head away from her. I could fall deep and there will be no return.
Neel
I was greyed out; my mind had shifted its burden to this weakened heart which was on the verge of nailing its counted pumps left to breathe in this body of mine. I felt cursed and blessed in a morning where I could charm my way to appreciate its beauty in an everlasting scene. As I started walking, the echoes of my steps were forming their gust, almost engulfing everything coming on its way. She was sitting deep inside the clouds of my meditation.
Radha
My dreams departed on a one way trip to an ocean as barren as my drifting thoughts. She changed the course of her moving head like the way a raven does in the farthest sky, her hair floated in the air like the dried dandelion seeds in the vacuum-less sky and I just kept howling in her never ending eyes. She then silently whispered, be like water.
Wolfgang
Never had it happen before, never did I feel such a wrecking desire inside of me. I couldn’t sleep; this sudden hollowness was prolonging its surreal labour of rinsing every other thought I could think of. It felt like I was walking on a thin rope with burning ends, in a delicate state of losing my only being left; If only I could insist on her presence and even if I try to summon up her of what I could remember, her moving silhouette was summarising my grounds and reasons of my continuation.
Crook
This love may hurt a pain of thousand nails, a nail may rust inside, for I decay for I remake, her coldness is my warmth.
Shahed
It was more like the brightest sunshine being traumatised by the darkest cloud, no matter how hard I blow the wind, it never stops raining and the darkness never goes away. I think I love her.
It's Okay, You're Okay!
Such was my wandering love who drifted alone in the dark nothingness of the empty sky, forcibly waking me up from a dream in a dementia of perplexing oceanic state. I struggled to stay afloat as her tears fell down from the sky, I was punished to hear her screams as the gods slipped a cry from the devil’s eyes.
This is beyond words I like the original ideas you have The only thing I can do is clapping
This is beyond words I like the original ideas you have The only thing I can do is clapping