Daan Botlek x St. Art India in Mumbai

Here another fantastic mural by Dutch artist & illustrator Daan Botlek whose minimalistic artworks seem to have a life of their own interacting with the environment around them in the most amazing ways.
Botlek spent few weeks in India, traveling and painting, and taking part of the St+Art India Festival in Mumbai for which he created this new piece titled “Continental Drift” at a local elementary school showing Botlek’s limited colour palette and amazing depth perception tricks.
His work starts very intuitive and it was therefore difficult for him to answer questions like “what is it?”

There were kids around all the time, each of them demanding a lot of attention. I tried to ignore them as much as possible, but sometimes I would try to answer some questions. Basically there was just one major question: What is it, what is it about? A question for which I had no answer. I don’t know what it’s going to be, and I also don’t know what it is about. I just make images which could be something. So I could only return the question: what do you think that it is? Unfortunately this did not compute and after a while some kids would become a bit irritated. ‘Why don’t you want to tell us what it is!?’ For which I could only reply: ‘Why don’t YOU want to tell me what it is!’

Later on one of the teachers told me that this is the way kids are being tought in India, in absolutes. To let your fantasies run wild is something they’re are not used to, or at least they have unlearned it at school. But after a few days of painting different groups would form debating all possibilities of what the image could be, that was a cool thing to see happening!