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This Is A One-Of-A-Kind Collection Of Hand-Drawn Portraits Of My Father Featuring Decades Of Pop Icons From Many Genres And Cultures
The series is a profoundly personal project that resides on sentiments. What started as a deeply personal experience of painting, I turned to explore mass hysteria centered around Pop Culture in my paintings.
This ongoing series explores unique hand-drawn images of my Pop (Dad) as pop icons across various decades, genres, and cultures.
My Pop was never famous nor was he a sought-after man.
He was a simpleton living a simple life - an ordinary routine, an ordinary job on the Railways, and ordinary dreams that culminated in simple middle-class realities. He was not the president of any local club, nor did he win a lottery.
Despite living such an ordinary unpopular life, in a world thriving 24/7 on insta-popularity, my simple Pop was simply happy.
He married late. I too took my own sweet time to come along. This resulted in us being two generations apart.
Far from Pop's unpopular universe, I live in a world connected on Facebook, breathing on Instagram, fighting on Twitter, and binging on Quirky Memes and Pop-Culture.
Herein started my artistic experiment. The plan was simple – I began with a painting I made of Pop and then started repainting him into pop icons who dominate the mainstream alleys of social and digital media. An unpopular face was slowly assuming multiple popular identities. I was doing 'Pop'-culture my way.
Is this my quest to make my unpopular Pop popular? Is this a comment on pop culture? Or is it simply a practical joke I am pulling on my Dad? Frankly speaking, it is none of the above while being all of these.
And so with the ongoing journey, I continue to amuse myself by creating ‘Pop’ icon art, while he continues to simply enjoy, the simple amusements of his simpleton life.
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