The skies carry a beauty that one can get lost in for hours while contemplating one’s place in the universe or lunch plans. It is no secret that the pale blue heavens have piqued the curiosity of many an astronomer, philosopher and artist; and the latest in those line of artists is Geethu, a watercolor artist and illustrator based in the UK.
Geethu is an aerospace engineer by profession, and she tells me that her love affair with the skies began when she was a child; she describes them as having an uncontrollable beauty. From a young age she always dreamed of being a pilot or an aerospace engineer. For a brief period she worked at an insurance firm, but jumped ship to Aerospace engineering at the first chance that she got. “Now I get to learn something new about airplanes everyday and I even lend a hand in making them fly” she says.
Geethu has been painting since she was a young girl in Kerala, “Back then I was painting without any idea about technique, but I knew that I loved painting, so I kept at it and learned by constantly experimenting and figuring things out on my own” Later on she honed her technique through a lot of classes on Skillshare. She has ended up coming full circle, because she now provides classes of her own on the platform she learned from. She pre-records all her lessons with her voice talking the learner through each step in the process. She tells me that she also edits her own videos and editing like painting, was something that she taught herself.
Her Instagram is filled with lively landscapes mostly featuring aircrafts of all kinds, either bounding through the sky, taking off, hurtling down from the sky towards the runway, poised majestically on the tarmac or on gently rocking waves, while the sky bleeds into a smorgasbord of colors, which settle with ease on the viewer’s eyes, “I love the vibrancies in the sky when the sun sets and rises, there are so many shades of colors and virtually a thousand versions of a sunset or sunrise can be done.”
This isn’t to say that she exclusively paints airplanes in their natural habitat; she also paints a variety of other subjects, ranging from still life to beauteous landscapes of forests, fields, and sea shores that are brimming with a surreal and psychedelic aura and even delicacies that look good enough to eat.
She tells me that she works on many pieces at a time, “Sometimes I start working on another painting, while the one I have been working on is left out to dry.” She tells me that she spends 3-4 a day painting, and she uses a combination of her own pictures taken during vacations and trips and images found on the internet to create the mesmerizing pieces that she posts online.
Despite an having an overwhelming body of work, she has only started showing her work to the denizens of the internet quite recently; as it has only been a little more than a year since she started her Instagram page. Nevertheless she has established herself, through her spellbinding works, as an artistic force to be reckoned with. Apart from painting and teaching she is also one of the brand ambassadors for Art Philosophy, Inc. an art supplies company based in California; which she describes as a very proud moment in her life.
For those setting out to learn, she advises to choose the right kind of paper, as it can make or break a painting and to pay attention to the variety of brushes that are available. She stresses the importance of technique, “If you learn and keep working on your technique, you will gain greater control over your skills, if you do that then everything will become relatively easy”. With a little over 500 works of art to her credit, the sky is the limit for this artist.
You can check out Geethu's art work on her Instagram handle @colourfulmystique
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