Reframing the Productivity Narrative with the Sneaky Artist Nishant Jain

We are reframing the productivity narrative with Instagram and Substack-famous sketch artist Nishant Jain — otherwise known as the Sneaky Artist. Nishant trained as an engineer, almost got his PhD, and then switched tracks to make art in public — sneakily. Now his full-time gig is sketching with a recognizable yellow fountain pen so that he can’t erase anything — he’s very committed to the line. And if you’re ever in Vancouver, you might just happen upon one of his drawings left behind in a café or a public library. With Nishant, we talked about how he believes that everyone can be an artist and the inspiration he got from living in Chicago, where he watched a lot of bad stand-up comedy. We also unpacked productivity culture, art for art’s sake, and whether we can even have human experiences anymore without making content about them. And we heard about his new baby — who he’s now sketching too.

Nishant Jain is a writer, artist and podcaster in Vancouver. As a Sneaky Artist, he draws the people around him in the spaces he inhabits, finding moments of accidental beauty in ordinary places on ordinary days. He shares his work and ideas with thousands of readers on Substack and Instagram.

Links:
At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
For more from the Sneaky Artist, follow him on Instagram and Substack or check out his website

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Chapters

• 0:00 This week's episode
• 1:45 What is sneaky art?
• 9:08 Going out of one's way to have a fuller sensory experience
• 13:29 Being inconspicuous and still wanting to be around people
• 16:33 Setting the terms of interaction with community
• 22:49 Trusting your lines
• 27:59 People who say, "Oh, I'm not an artist"
• 36:45 Every artist must be self-propelled
• 41:18 Sources of support
• 45:31 Attention is a filter
• 49:17 Doing a close read of the world we inhabit
• 51:51 An eight-day-old baby
• 55:39 Speed round

Transcript

Natalie
Hey, it’s Nat. 

Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together to reframe some of life’s big and small problems. We’re moms, writers. 

Natalie
We have soft boundaries. We see the world differently, but we both lean into vulnerability together and with our guests, because we like deep dives. So come with us — let’s reframe something. 

This week, we are reframing the productivity narrative. 

Rebecca
With Instagram and Substack-famous sketch artist Nishant Jain — otherwise known as the Sneaky Artist. Nishant trained as an engineer, almost got his PhD, and then switched tracks to make art in public — sneakily. 

Natalie
Now his full-time gig is sketching with a recognizable yellow fountain pen so that he can’t erase anything — he’s very committed to the line. And if you’re ever in Vancouver, you might just happen upon one of his drawings left behind in a café or a public library. 

Rebecca
With Nishant, we talked about how he believes that everyone can be an artist and the inspiration he got from living in Chicago, where he watched a lot of bad stand-up comedy. 

Natalie
We also unpacked productivity culture, art for art’s sake, and whether we can even have human experiences anymore without making content about them. 

Rebecca
And we heard about his new baby — who he’s now sketching too. 

Natalie
So let’s get to it: reframing the productivity narrative with Nishant Jain. 

We’re talking today with Nishant Jain, otherwise known as the Sneaky Artist, and we’re very excited to have this conversation happening because I’ve been creeping you for a while — and so you’re not the only sneaky one in this parasocial relationship, my friend. So we’re just wondering if you can share with our Reframeables listeners: what is sneaky art? 

Nishant
Yeah. Thank you so much, Natalie. Oh, so you know, “sneaky art” is a phrase that I picked out of a bit of a feeling of shame and a feeling of embarrassment about what I was trying to do. And over the years, it has evolved to have more meanings, and I have accepted more meanings for it. So let me give you what Sneaky Art 1.0 was. 1.0 was 2017 and I did not know how to draw, and I had always wanted to learn how to draw better. I had been drawing this stick figure webcomic for about 5, 6 years, and I just wanted to do better with it. I didn’t want to just have this stick figure gimmick. But of all the things I tried to learn to draw, nothing absolutely worked for me. Like, I am very lazy. I am very difficult. I find it very difficult to maintain a habit. So everything I’d start, I would drop off, and it would never build on anything else. 

In 2017, I found myself living in Chicago. I had just completely turned my life around. I decided to become a writer and abandon my PhD program, abandon my growing career in academia. And I was writing this novel that was going to be the greatest novel of all time. But it’s really difficult to write a novel, and I hit writer’s block, or I was just procrastinating, and I started using a sketchbook in order to procrastinate. I was in Chicago (and I do still believe Chicago is the most incredible city in the world) and I just wanted to explore this incredible city and see these incredible, crazy people who live in America and you know, really live out and express their lives in a way that people of other countries don’t. 

Every street of Chicago seemed to be offering me something new to look at, and I thought a sketchbook is a good excuse to do it. A sketchbook is a good excuse to spend time when you feel like an outsider in a place and you feel like you don’t have any reason to be here — maybe you don’t belong here. A sketchbook is a good excuse to permit yourself to spend time in that space. So I started using a sketchbook to just walk around and give myself the permission to sit somewhere and watch and make a drawing out of it. Because I was so bad at it and I thought this whole business of trying to learn to draw from watching people do things on the streets was so embarrassing, I decided to call it “sneaky art” — that I would go somewhere, I would sit in the corner seat of a café with nobody behind me, I’d draw very quickly and I would get out of there before anybody saw me, and I’d be sneaky in this respect. And the idea that someone might accost me, even out of curiosity, and just ask me what I’m doing, it just terrified me because I would have to say that I’m trying to learn to draw. How ridiculous. So I called it “sneaky art” because I wanted to get away with something. 

As I started doing this more and more, and I started drawing in places that were beautiful, but I was not drawing in a prominent spot. I couldn’t sit right in front of the thing I wanted to draw because I didn’t want anybody to see me. So I was finding these inconspicuous corners. I started to even look at things that were not really being seen by everybody. So I started observing just a person at a café, just reading the newspaper — how odd that somebody in 2017 is reading a physical newspaper. And I thought, “That’s interesting. Why don’t I draw him?” This person, I remember him even now. He was very old and his back was hunched over. And I remember drawing him. He was one of the first people I drew under the title of Sneaky Art. And I started thinking that, you know, it’s not just me being sneaky. And this idea kept building in my head about what I’m doing, what I’m finding. I was drawing very ordinary things in very ordinary places. Nothing was super beautiful. Nothing was hashtag-worthy. Nothing was trending as such. 

Soon after Chicago, we moved to Wisconsin with my wife’s job and we were in the middle of nowhere in Wisconsin — literally, if you point to Wisconsin and you just put your finger in the middle of nowhere, that’s where we were living. It’s a beautiful little town called Eau Claire. But for all of its beauty, the problem was nothing was super Instagram-friendly. Nothing was going to immediately catch fire. And I was just looking at very ordinary, everyday things, but I was trying to find something interesting in it because I’d gotten addicted to this business of walking around with a sketchbook and looking for beautiful things. 

And I started to realize that it’s not just me being sneaky — it’s also everything in our world. You know, you’ve got all these beautiful things everywhere. They’re right in front of us, but we don’t see them. So it’s not just the artist, but even the art that is sneaky. It’s difficult to see in our everyday lives because we’re so jaded and we are so full of our own media. People travel with headphones plugged in and looking at their tiny device screens. So we’ve built this bubble of media around ourselves when we go out in public spaces. No, we can’t hear anything else. We don’t look at anything else. We don’t touch anything that we don’t need to. 

So our entire sensory bubble is this enclosed space that we have created for ourselves when we’re out in a public space. And I thought what I’m doing is I’m bursting my bubble. I want to look at things and I want to feel things and I want to hear things. I stopped listening to music when I went outdoors, I stopped looking at my phone when I went outdoors — I just wanted to be in the space that I was. If there’s a café and they have whatever music they’re playing, I’ll listen to that music. I’ll overhear those conversations, I’ll listen to the espresso machine, and I’ll be part of where I am. And in this space, being here, I’m going to try to find something beautiful. So Sneaky Art 2.0 became about appreciating that the world is full of beautiful things, and it is the job of the artist to find that beautiful thing, to spend time and attention to discover the beauty in everyday life. 

Rebecca
I think that’s amazing. 

Natalie
Yeah, I love it. 

Rebecca
It’s so radical because it’s just this opposite thing of trying to be great, or trying to impress, or find the perfect image that will go viral, or the perfect meme, or I don’t know… like, it’s so simple. 

Natalie
What really resonates for me is the message that you’ve just shared, Nishant, with what your newsletter’s about, Rebecca, which is finding beauty in the mundane. So I mean, in many ways, there’s an alignment right here — probably therefore you’re going to speak to your heart a little bit here, right? I mean, like, there is something so inherently beautiful about finding a sneaky moment of beauty — to be surprised, right? What is it, surprised by joy? That kind of an idea. 

Rebecca
It is interesting because when I go out, I’ve stopped listening to podcasts or music either — like, I am so saturated in what’s happening in my head when I’m in my office or whatever that I’m, like, desperate to be part of the world, and just what are the sounds and stuff? Ok, but so do you touch things? Do you literally touch things? 

Nishant
Oh, you know, now I live in one of the most beautiful places in the world. I live in British Columbia, in Vancouver city. I’m surrounded by not only urban beauty, but absolutely incredible natural beauty. And now when I go out for a walk, I touch little acorn seeds, I pick them up, I look at flowers, I touch the bark of 100, 200-year-old trees — and I just think about how lucky I am. I’m from Calcutta in India, a different world entirely, and now I’m in a place where I’m surrounded by huge towering trees and flowers and things I have never seen before. And I’m trying to make space to understand them better. And I’m going out of my way to have the full sensory experience that I can. 

I’ve become curious about trees. I’ve become curious about birds. I’m trying to listen to more birds — I have friends who can identify birds by just the song and I’m just in awe of that ability. But I don’t recognize them yet. But a friend of mine told me that, you know, knowing the name of the bird or the animal or the tree or the flower from sight is really not the point. The point is in fact to not know the name, to just really see. 

So I was reading recently about… well, not recently, but I’ve been reading about existentialism, and there’s this thing called phenomenology — I don’t know if you’re aware of phenomenology. So phenomenology is a precursor to what would become existentialist thought. And the phenomenologist said that you should look at the world without any preconceptions and labels. So to see a thing as if it is completely fresh and not to put labels like, “Oh, that’s a red flower. Oh, that’s a rose.” Because labelling it is a way to stop thinking about it, because you feel like you’re done looking at it. 

It’s the same as taking a picture and moving on. One of the reasons I want to draw instead of taking a picture (because surely a picture is a good way to capture what you see as well, maybe a much better way to capture what you see) is because I want to spend time and I want to consciously, actively engage and observe and see little things. This job of translating it onto the page is another way of seeing, because I’m seeing it and then I’m translating it according to the tool in my hand — like, it’s a fountain pen most of the times. 

So I’m looking at something that has all these colours, all these lights and shadows, and I’m trying to convert it into just lines and shapes. And that job is a way of appreciating what I see, but not seeing it as what I know. So to see something without knowing what it is, to suspend all of these filters and perceptions of our world and the knowledge that we acquire and just draw away, just look at a tree and to just see the lines that encircle this tree, and then to put those lines down, is this fresh way to look at it and to find something outside of organized knowledge. It’s not about knowing what tree it is. 

Rebecca
Just going back, though, to touching things, what can I touch in sort of a gross city? 

Nishant
I think, you know, the surfaces of a table — just knowing, just feeling a little bit of, even a film of dirt. You know, it depends on how romantic you can get about it. I touch a thing and I wonder, “How many other people have touched this? Am I part of a chain of hundreds and thousands of people?” So I spent a little bit of time in Europe when I was studying engineering and I was around things that were 500 years old, 600 years old, and I would touch it and I would wonder, “Has somebody touched this exact spot in the last hundred years, or just me? Has someone put their feet at this exact spot on the pavement recently, or is it just me?” And can you find some kind of pleasure or joy in that little frivolous thought? So I can. And so these things give me a bit of a kick. 

Rebecca
Is your nightmare to have to, like, sit in an art gallery and draw the painting in front of you and then people see you drawing — or is that, like, you’re over that now? 

Nishant
I thought I would get over it. I’ve been in Vancouver for about three years and I’ve become kind of popular — like, I get recognized every now and then. People recognize me by the yellow pen that I use. I’ve been on TV a couple of times, so people recognize me and they come up and sometimes they say hi and it’s just the most terrifying thing for me. You know, I have never had a negative experience. I have always had a lot of people politely nod and move on. A lot of people say hi and say something very nice. Children will come and peer into your sketchbook and just be a little excited and not disturb you. But it’s just who I am — like, there’s no logic here, but it’s just who I am. I feel like just somebody might ask me what I’m doing. Somebody might ask even a nice question — “How did you get about doing this?” And then I’ll have to tell them who I am. I’ll have to say, “Oh, I’m this artist. I do this thing.” And just all of that business makes me very self-conscious. 

We can go back to existentialism and I can answer it through that. So I recommend this book to everybody — it’s by an author called Sarah Bakewell, it’s called At the Existentialist Café, one of the best books I’ve read on the subject. And she talks about how Jean-Paul Sartre, who sort of pioneered or wrote down what is existentialism for us, and he gives this example of being in a garden. And you’re in a garden and you look at things and you look at flowers and trees, and all of these things are objects in your world. You are the subject — so subjects and objects. Subjects have free will and power, and objects are objectified. They are just a thing to you. And you walk through this landscape and you look at what you see and there’s a tree and there’s a road, et cetera et cetera — and then you see one more person on the horizon coming slowly towards you. 

And this thought will enter your mind, that enters our mind now with social media: “What do I look like to them? Am I fat? Am I thin? Am I well-dressed? Is my hair in place? Am I brown? Is that a problem? Am I a woman? Is that ok to be?” Suddenly you have all these labels on you from nothing the person did, but just because you see yourself reflected in them. That person, just by existing, has objectified you, and now you are an object in their eyes — and this is what terrifies me the most. The idea that I am this thing to people and I have no control over that, and I want to not be conscious of it for as long as possible. I want to be the subject of my world. And being out of attention, being inconspicuous and still wanting to be around people, still wanting to draw human activity, makes it a difficult balance, and I have to try to find that balance every day, every time I go out to draw. How do I find that sweet spot for myself? 

Natalie
The last conversation that we had on Reframables was with a colleague in the world of art making who lives in Victoria — so quite close to you, you know, just across the way. But her work in terms of climate activism has made her feel very deeply hopeless, actually. So she’s really anti-hope, in terms of a term, around the world that she lives in. And what gives her some sense of possibility is community. So for her, there’s something about the interactions with the humans in her life and around her life that seemed to gift her the ability to move forward in the face of so much destruction. So it’s very interesting to hear your framing through the existentialist lens — you know, a different understanding of humanity, but then is there still a sense of community that has been built up through your sneaky art? I think so — like, you leave pieces of art just around, right? Isn’t that kind of part of the experience? 

Nishant
Oh yeah — that is such a great question because it’s an interesting dichotomy of, like, I really don’t want anybody to come and talk to me, but I love being in a place full of people, because what is fundamentally curious to me is what people are up to. And this became a question for me since I became an immigrant. I left India in 2010 in order to study more, to pursue ambitions. I went to the Netherlands for about five years, and then I was in the US for the next five years, and since then I’m in Canada. And I want to be around people because I’m curious about what people do. But I don’t really want to be inside-inside — I don’t want 50 questions lobbed at me. I don’t want to have my nicely polished answer that I give them every time. I’m so self-conscious of myself while I’m doing it. I know that I’m putting on this thing in order to be this person, that it’s your job to be — you know, you’re a brand. Once you become a big Instagram person, then you are an Instagram person. You know, all of these things — again, the objectification, it flattens you. And I’m very conscious of that flattening and it drives me crazy to participate in it. 

And I want to be nice to people, but if I have to be nice to people, I hate having to be nice to people. So all of this is a result of overthinking, which I can’t get rid of. So none of it is healthy, none of it is good for you, but it’s just: I have to deal with it. This is the reason why I also draw. So I find I want to connect with people at a safe distance. So I like to leave art, but I don’t like to find out who got it. I don’t hang around to see if someone picked it up. I think my duty is done once my end of the job is done, once I’ve left it at a café table, in a free library, at a bench, near the sea. And I take a lot of joy from that sense of giving it or renouncing it, the sense of giving it away and not having control over it as a big control freak. To consciously let something go that I made with all the love I could, all the ability I could — not casually but with real intent, and then to just discard it and to put it out into the universe. And who knows what will happen to it? I certainly won’t know. I think I get a lot of strength from doing it. 

And this newsletter equation that I’ve built over the last three years has been the most positive of all because all of it is built around consent. There’s my consent: I hit the publish button, I choose what I want to write. And there is consent on the other end. It shows up chronologically in somebody’s inbox. I don’t jump out at them on Instagram. I don’t do something flashy to get their attention so they stop scrolling. I don’t get their attention for five seconds and then they’re gone, or one second and then they’re gone. I’m not doing this for cheap likes and retweets and whatever, whatever. I really wait for them to give me attention to whatever degree they want. Once a week, five minutes. That’s what I ask my readers. That’s what I think I want from them. 

And if I can get that at their leisure, at their choice of time, at their choice of when they want to give it to me, I think we are all healthier for it, and this marks a very nice relationship between us. Typing out a message, knowing that someone is in your inbox is a very special thing compared to somebody being on your Instagram feed. I think there’s a lot of permission they’ve given me, which means that they also treat me with a lot more consideration than they would give to a random Instagram creator. So being able to set the terms of this interaction with community is very empowering to me, and I’m really enjoying that. 

Rebecca
Sometimes people ask us if we make money doing this podcast. The answer is we don’t. In fact, every hour we spend on Reframables is time not spent at a paying gig. And the steps to making a podcast are actually many. Finding the guests, booking the guests, reading the books, planning the questions, editing the interview, uploading it into the podcast world, making the artwork. So if you value this podcast, please consider supporting it with a financial contribution. Memberships start at $6 a month on Patreon and include a monthly extra where we record our five things in a week. In this world we have to support what we love, and with that support an energy comes back to us — so thanks for going to patreon.com/reframables and becoming a supporter. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to be making a podcast, but here we are, three years later, still doing it with your help. So go to patreon.com/reframables — now, on to the show.

On one of your posts, you write, “Be bold and trust your lines.” Is that a life metaphor? 

Nishant
All of art is a life — like, I tell people that you should make art just because it’s the most human thing you can do. There is no reason to do it. It’s just part of humanity. You have to do it in order to complete being a human being. So it has given me lessons that I did not think I would need, I did not think I would reflect upon, and I certainly did not think would apply to my life. I started using a fountain pen before I knew how to draw. I have always been a perfectionist. I’ve spent hours and hours just making the right line on my iPad. I used to draw so much on the iPad because it would allow me this freedom to undo every line so easily, and I could erase all my mistakes so comfortably — have no cost to my experiments, just undo the mistake and try again. 

And I reached a point where I thought, “I keep undoing so much. I never just go with it.” And I’m also only using the iPad screen and only using the Apple Pencil, so everything feels the same. It’s just the Apple Pencil tip on this iPad screen — which is excellent, but it’s all the same, always. So I picked up a fountain pen with the idea that I want to not be able to erase a line. I just want to see what happens and I want to deal with it. I just want to make more and more drawings. I want to get to the end of them and I want to turn the page and I want to make a new one instead of worrying over the perfection of every line. 

So I decided that I needed to be bold, and having put myself through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages — this job, look at a thing, translate it in your mind, bring it onto your hands and express it through lines by your hands and the skill of your muscles and that pen on that paper. This business has taken me through many rides. Knowing what I wanted something to look like and it didn’t work out, persevering through a sketch that looks like it’s not going the way I wanted, but if I just stuck with it, I went through to the end because I couldn’t erase a single line, I had to just go — and finding that, you know, it’s actually not so bad, I managed to quote-unquote rescue it, or maybe it didn’t need rescuing at all. 

So I came to this realization that there is just no reason not to trust yourself with your lines and the only way to get to anywhere good is if you completely trust it. I had given up any hopes of finding a style of my own — like, the idea that I could discover a style. I didn’t know how to draw until I was 29. I felt that it’s something that happens only to people when they’re geniuses — that at a very young age you just struck upon your thing, and surely it’s too late for me. But drawing with the fountain pen, drawing in these circumstances that I chose, like I’ve explained to you, and circumstances that are a reflection of who I am — I don’t want to be seen, so I draw from inconspicuous places. I’m very impatient, so I draw quickly. I’m using a fountain pen out of choice, so there’s no erasure in these lines — these lines are what they are. 

All of these are things that reflected back my own personality in my pages because they reflect me so accurately. These are all choices based upon myself. And so my pages started to tell me who I was. If I had to draw a person in 15 seconds because they’re at the traffic light, they leave and they’re gone, what is it that I drew? What is it that I skipped? What is it that I edited out? What is it I felt I had to include? These are things that told me about myself. And so my style emerged organically out of just really very unconsciously being myself, very firmly being myself. This is what I learned: that the more I chase after the things that are me, the more I stick with them, the less I become focused on erasing mistakes. The more accurately my art reflects me and leads to good things, leads to a comfortable space. Today when I draw, I don’t have to think, “Oh, I should draw in my style.” It’s just who I am — it’s like my handwriting. 

I tell people this also in my workshops: you know, writing and drawing are exactly the same thing — literally exactly the same thing. If you know how to write by hand, if you have a handwriting, you have a drawing style also. In both writing and drawing, we use lines and combinations of lines and shapes in order to give meaning to things. Sometimes we draw letters, sometimes we draw faces, but all of it is just lines and shapes. And worrying over style (“What kind of style do I have? How can I get that kind of style?”) is almost like worrying over handwriting. “When is my handwriting going to resemble Ernest Hemingway?” That’s really not the point. Your handwriting should be your handwriting, and similarly your drawing should be your drawing. And that’s where that advice comes from. 

Rebecca
When you’re saying art is the most important thing, what do you say to people that say, “Oh, I’m not an artist!”? 

Nishant
When people say that, you know, the fundamental mistake I think people make is they think that making art is about the drawing that you get at the end. So it’s a very silly thing that we do as adults and we never did when we were children. We can all think back to our lives when we were very young. We would draw and paint and scratch on things, and as soon as we were done, we would toss it away and we would start a new one — we would not look at it and critically examine it. We would not look at it and compare it to Van Gogh and think, “Why am I not as good as this person?” We had fun in the process of creation. 

So this is a difference between writing and drawing now. Writing is excruciating in the process. It is only fun having done it. You feel this immense relief after rounds and rounds of edits, looking at it at the end. Drawing is immensely joyful in the process of doing. It is almost irrelevant what the product is. I could, you could, anybody could — we could draw, and at the end of it we could tear the page and we could burn it, we could crumple it up and throw it, and it wouldn’t matter. The two hours, one hour, 30 minutes, 10 minutes, five minutes you spend drawing, that is the value of the act. This is why you draw: to spend time in a certain way. What happens at the end of it is so pointless. 

So when people say, “I’m not an artist,” they are just like adults, because this is what growing up does to you — this stupid thing, we obsess over results instead of process. “I shouldn’t do it if I’m not good at it,” and so you limit the number of things you allow yourself to do. It’s like saying, “I shouldn’t sing because I didn’t train at Juilliard to sing. “I shouldn’t dance because I didn’t go to school to dance.” It’s almost as silly as all of those things together — we shouldn’t do it unless we know that the result is so-and-so good, and thus approved by society as worthy of having been done. And all of that is absolutely irrelevant to the point of doing it, which is this time that you spend doing it. 

Natalie
Though we are so results-oriented in our capitalist, like, way of being, right? So it is such a hard thing to counter. I mean, as Rebecca started off saying, “Wow, you’re doing something really radical here,” it is quite radical to frame art-making as inherently valuable. 

Nishant
It’s very interesting — there’s a very clear gender difference here. So I’m part of the global community of urban sketchers and there are hundreds of thousands of people around the world who sit around in public spaces and draw from what they see. And I do workshops, and so I meet a lot of people who are interested in learning from me. And you find that this is particularly difficult for men to do. Somehow we are programmed into thinking that we should only do the things we’re very good at, and we should not waste time doing things when we’re bad at because then it reflects badly on us. So in their 30s, 40s, 50s, you find much fewer men who will pick up a new hobby, who will try something that they are bad at just to do it. And you will find a lot more women who are open to the idea of doing it. And this is my conjecture: they’re more open to the idea of spending time doing something nice, regardless of how well they do it. 

Natalie
I wonder… 

Nishant
It’s almost an eight to two ratio — like out of every 10 people, every 10 sketchers I’ll meet, two will be other men who aren’t already artists who just decided, “I’m going to spend some time doing this because it’s a nice way to spend time.” The urban sketching community around the world is truly special in that regard. You have maybe 80–90% of them are not artists, who have no necessary financial goals or, you know, personal goals with becoming professional artists, so to speak. They’re just there — they’re adults with responsibilities, jobs, obligations, who are carving out a bit of time because this is a good way to spend time. And that’s so special. 

Natalie
I would love to dig into, and not as if there’s an answer, but the why around kind of the gender construction of that. What socially has sort of made… maybe there’s, like, an easy answer, but I’m not finding it. 

Nishant
Yeah, I wonder — like, I feel like we are victims of our gender roles and the gender roles that our society dictates to us and the ideas of who we need to be. At one level it’s all adults because all children are process-oriented — they do it if it’s fun to do. They don’t care about how it’s going to be later. And all adults are results-oriented. Maybe the business of growing up teaches us not to do things we’re bad at because we as adults have a more strong sense of shame and self-consciousness. More ideas of how we have been objectified by the world and we don’t want to look like bad objects — we want to look like beautiful, glorious, perfect things and a bad drawing makes you imperfect, so to speak. 

Rebecca
My husband is really interesting because he draws. He started a Substack for a while, and he was drawing… well, he was doing leaves, but also then he got into drawing segments of oranges, and they were really cool. But I could see that he felt pull between, “Is this a good use of my time? I should be making money for the family.” And you know what? I struggled too, because I both loved the drawings, but we were like, “Oh, can we make this into an NFT? Can we monetize this?” — which we tried. So I even struggled with, “Do I support it or do I feel this anxiety that this is a bad use of time?” So it’s because of: don’t we need to get ahead? So it’s like this… 

Nishant
Productivity culture. 

Rebecca
Yeah. Yeah — like I’m so stuck in it, so… ok, now I just feel bad. Because he was drawing oranges, you guys, and then… 

Nishant
Yeah, imagine looking at the surface of an orange and finding joy in spending half an hour — just really all of these undulations, all of the texture of it. It’s so rich, there’s light bouncing off of it. And that we can find joy in just that — we don’t need the latest Netflix show. 

Natalie
I don’t think you need to feel bad, Bec. I don’t think it’s about that. 

Rebecca
I do. 

Natalie
But I do think there is something interestingly poignant for me as somebody who is later to sort of joining the more artistic stream of my life. I came out of teaching, Nishant, so I was there for 20 years. Public education — like, union member. You know what I mean, the whole deal. And then I’ve now moved into this freelancing world of creativity where teaching is still a component of it, but I’m writing. I have, you know, books and shows and all these things — kind of gone down the road with Rebecca, who has been an artist for her whole life. So in my transference over I see the dilemma play out in the one world which seems to allow more space for people to have hobbies because the world is so much more rigid in terms of its schedule that you actually say, “I’m going to carve out this time, this space, to go sketch,” right? Potentially something like that — or knit or, you know, draw. And very gendered — lots of things happening over in that world too. But in the artistic world, one’s got to still pay their rent. It’s like: when does one get to have the privilege? 

Nishant
The play. 

Natalie
And the play, right? The privilege of play — that’s an interesting way to look at it. 

Nishant
Absolutely. Productivity culture harms us so much in this respect — like, again: what is the result of it? Is the result worth it? Should I put in the time if I don’t get what I want from it at the end of it? And how should it look? It should look like these other successful people that I see. What social media has done is it’s this business of being in a garden and being alone. You can never be alone inside your head anymore. You always have a million strangers staring at you all the time. Even in your deepest thoughts you wonder, “Would this be viral? Would this break Twitter? If I wrote this thought down, would it be ok? Should I be thinking about this stuff?” Like, our brains are colonized. We are constantly thinking about: “What content can I make out of this human experience that I’m having, and should I be having this human experience if I can’t make content out of it?” 

Natalie
Ok. Well, that leads exactly then into my next question which is about how your art, perhaps — is it seen by you, are you living it out as activism? Is that something that you see as a necessary component of it? Is it as radical as we are seeing it to be? 

Nishant
Yeah, well, I think the primary motivator cannot be something external for me. I think every artist has to be self-propelled. You have to have faith when nobody else does. You have to see it before anybody else sees it. Same for a writer — any kind of creative person. So you have to find your own fuel, and I think if your fuel is other people and how they will react to it and how you will change them (and this is how I’m referring to activism in this context: bringing about change) — but if the image of other people is so important to your fuel, I feel like you are not going to be able to sustain it for very long. I think your fuel has to be self-motivation. 

So I was doing a PhD program until 2015, and I was two and a half years into it, and all this while, through my bachelor’s degree, through my master’s degree in engineering, through my PhD program which was in neuroscience, I had been writing on the side. I’d been writing stories and I’d been writing poems and I’d been writing scripts for television. I was writing for a short period for a television show in India. I was making comics, I was making short films with friends. I was making jokes, I wrote standup comedy, I tried standup comedy. I was always trying to do these things on the side after all of this other work that I had. 

And I reached a point where I decided I just wanted to express myself fully. I really just wanted to be a writer. And I jumped ship and I did it. And people ask whether it’s difficult to do. And it is difficult to do, but it was relatively easier for me when I realized that I was not running away — I was running toward something. There was a way that I wanted to be, there was a way that I wanted to live, and I wanted to run towards that. Like, every one of us is in a marathon of our lives, but sometimes the races we are running are given to us by other people. Ambition is often given to us by other people. They tell us what to be ambitious about, what is it that society rewards. So you know, this is worth chasing because my relatives, my family, my friends, everybody will laud me for it and I’ll get all of these brownie points. So a lot of things are borrowed. 

And if you find your thing, the race you want to run, I feel like it is a primary responsibility to run it because otherwise what’s the point of anything? Again, me being very existential. If you find your reason to be, it’s your duty to follow it. Chicago gave this to me. I was in Chicago for research at Northwestern University. I was doing experiments with stroke patients. And in the evenings I would go to see standup comedy. And I would go to these open mic nights where I was too afraid to go on stage. And I would see people who would go week in, week out, every day — this club, then next day another club. And some of them were really awful. And they would try the same joke and it wouldn’t work. And he would try the same joke at another place and it’s not working. It’s just: you’re not good at this — but he’s doing it every night. And I just thought, “You know, if he’s going to do this every night and he’s not even really good, why am I not doing this? Whatever I want to do, why am I not doing what I want? He’s just doing what he wants to do.” 

So in a very real sense, Americans gave me a lot of permission to chase after what I wanted to chase after but I didn’t think I was allowed to chase — because I grew up in India and we grew up with a very different set of rules and a very different set of ideas of what is a good life. So that’s another reason why I feel indebted to Chicago, because it set me free. Really, truly America gave me freedom in that respect. I went back to the Netherlands. I told my professor, “I’m leaving. I’m sorry. I can’t finish this PhD anymore. I have to figure out a new life.” I didn’t tell them what I wanted to do, because — again, shame and self-consciousness. How am I going to tell you I want to be a novelist, and I’ve been just wasting your time for the last three years pretending like I really love research. So I didn’t say anything — I just said, “I’m not going to do this anymore.” And I started writing and then I was in Chicago with my girlfriend who’s now my wife, and then I started drawing. 

Rebecca
So was your wife a huge champion of yours? 

Nishant
Oh yes —I could not have done this without her. Like, she’s been my girlfriend since the first year of bachelor’s undergraduate in India, and she’s a dentist. And she was in dental school, I was in engineering school, and on our first date I told her that I want to be a writer. And she thought, “Well, why are you doing engineering then?” But all of us study what we study in India because we’ve been told it’s smart and good and it’s going to put you on a good path, so we do it and you repress those things that you really want to do that are impractical. And she always supported me — like, I would discuss with her that, you know, “I’m joining this PhD program now. Should I be joining a PhD program now, or should I be trying to become a writer?” And she would always encourage me to drop out, do what you want. I’ll support you. And artists need that — like, even before the financial support, you need the faith. You need somebody to validate you to some extent. “You’re allowed to park here. Don’t worry.” So I’ve had a lot of support. 

Like, even my parents, Indian parents — so, with Indian expectations and all they needed was about a couple of weeks of persuasive argument and they were ok with it. My in-laws, Indian in-laws — “Really, my future son-in-law is trying to write a novel? He’s not going to find a job even with a master’s degree?” They were supportive. So I’ve been really lucky to be around people who are reasonable. I’ve been really lucky to be around people who have had faith in me. I’m an artist now and then a writer. Like, I never thought I was going to be an artist when I quit my PhD program. It was only about writing. So even since then, directions have changed. 

It’s not activism — it’s always been chasing curiosity. And what made me curious then was telling stories. Then I came to Chicago and what made me curious was Americans living their very American lives. And then I became curious about how I can use a fountain pen to say things. And I don’t have to make a funny caption at the bottom, I don’t have to be a cartoonist — I can just make a drawing in five minutes and it can say things to people and people relate to it. How curious is this? This is really wild. Somebody a year later, when I sold my first piece of art — like, just a little drawing I posted on Reddit and someone wanted, I was just amazed. Like, you want it and it doesn’t have a caption, it’s not witty, I didn’t put any words to it. You just want the drawing, and it’s incredible. I never thought I would be at this place where someone would just want my drawing. 

So I feel like the more you challenge your curiosity, the more you chase it, the more conscious you are around it, the more things you unearth that maybe people who don’t have the space to give that kind of time and attention, they don’t see. And for me, it’s been cities, it’s been people, it’s been how people live in cities, how our urban life is going. And that is affecting people in a certain way to see my art, to see this simplified rendering of our world — not a photograph, so it doesn’t have colours, it doesn’t have shadows, it doesn’t have every single thing that’s in my frame. It’s a very conscious, very powerful filter of all the things that I paid attention to and nothing else. Everything else is not on the page — only the things that I paid attention to in the little time that I gave myself. 

So it’s a very, very sharp look at something that we all see. And I think when you are loyal to yourself, it says something. And when people look at art, they don’t want to necessarily be told a very specific thing. They just want to see that you tried to say something. And as long as you are trying to say something, it has an effect. And that’s all I’m trying to do. I’m being very conscious that I have to be saying something, even if it’s a little frivolous thing. 

Rebecca
I like this line of yours: “Attention is a filter. Ink is a way to note what passes through.” Do you think that’s sort of summing up what you’re saying? 

Nishant
Oh, so much — yeah. As an engineer, I think of information and if you look at a photograph, a photograph has a lot of information. The better technology gets, every photograph has information about what is in the frame — all the light that fell on it, all the colours that it could capture. And sometimes we add a filter and we take away certain information and we leave certain other information. We twist some information to look sepia and we twist others to look black and white — so we take away colours. 

So we are always filtering things. And when we look at something and you look at it not for an infinite amount of time, but you look at it for a given amount of time and you leave, what you remember that you paid attention to is not all the information in that moment. Human minds don’t work like that — we are always filtering away and focusing on something. So drawing, firstly, in terms of the eyes and the person behind those eyes, the first filter is who you are. What is it that you like? What is it that you don’t really care for? What catches your eye and what you glaze over? And the second filter is what is the tool that you’re using? 

So if you’re using a paintbrush and you’ve got colours, what you’re observing is also colourful and you are respecting shadows — you’re thinking about light and you’re thinking about how these colours play next to each other. If you’re working with ink like I am, then you’re not looking at colours anymore, you’re not even looking at swaths of shapes — you’re just looking at the borders of things. How does this shape look next to this shape? How does this person who is 10 feet away look transposed next to this person who is 30 feet away? Because on my page they are right next to each other because my page is flat. So converting this three dimensional world full of colour and light and shadow into these two dimensional lines and shapes is a very conscious filtering process. First me, then the tool that I decide to work with. And this is the final product that somebody sees — a very simplified version. 

Like, earlier, Rebecca, you’d said, “We are so saturated by media,” and I think that’s a very specific and correct use of phrase. We are very saturated. We are just inundated with so many pictures that I feel it’s very difficult to be a photographer today. Everyone has already seen everything. You couldn’t show anything and get a wow, because everything has been seen — everything looks like something they’ve seen. Taking away information, I think, is a very powerful tool in this time. How do I not saturate you? How do I give you a very specific, very little thing? It’s suitable to Instagram where you have, like, microseconds with your viewers. And partly I started doing this also because of that — maybe it was an influence thinking that I only have one second from my viewer, even from my fans. How do I give them what I want to give them in one second? How do I get them to see exactly this and not distract them with other stuff? 

Secondly, not wanting to be seen in public meant I couldn’t carry colours because I’d have to open out my palette and have my water and brushes, and I wanted to be very inconspicuous. So a little book just like this and just one pen and that’s all I need and I can draw quietly. Nobody will know what I’m doing and I can get out. And all of that — again, my curiosity, my personality, it translated into these things, it became these things, and I learned how my attention was filtering reality and how that was actually playing to my benefit. 

Natalie
I keep trying to get my grad students these days to do close reads of very small sections of text to try and figure out a way to take a bunch of information in, like, really dense texts and somehow gain some deeper understanding of something smaller — and to see that as valuable, right? Like, instead of sort of just making, like, a cursory or summary remark about a large piece, actually just really pay attention and practice this close read skill that many folks haven’t done since high school — if they even did it then. So it’s very interesting to hear you describe your whole practice in many ways as being kind of like a close read of the world that you inhabit. It’s pretty beautiful. 

Nishant
I love that thought, you know. I grew up only wanting to be a writer. So I’ve been always enchanted by words. The prerequisite to being a writer is you’re a voracious reader and I have read everything I could grab. And in India, we grew up on a lot of British authors — that was the kind of books that we had coming in. So a lot of my reading was British authors and that’s what I thought English writing is about. And only when I was in my 20s I was exposed to American writing, and Kurt Vonnegut changed my life because I understood that you can just say things with words in less than three syllables, and in one paragraph you can pack a gut punch and get a laugh. And it doesn’t have to be super verbose. It can be really, really, really simple. 

So Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski, these guys taught me or they showed me how to not need dense reads and how to really get to the gist of something, how to find the essence of what you’re trying to say and how to play with words in that sense. So how a dense read, how British books in my mind, British novelists in my mind, at least the ones I grew up on — how their reading is more of a dance with words. It’s more of an experience for a more leisurely time when you don’t have television to distract you. What are you going to do? You’re going to read this book. You’re going to read the 1800 pages of War and Peace, Hugo writing Les Miserables, or The Count of Monte Cristo — so big, so big. I could never read it now. And opposed to American writers, who somehow have this sense that, you know, we don’t have a lot of time to waste, guys — let’s get to it. And the comparative irreverence towards language and to the established norms of how to write. So I learned a lot from this comparison in my life too. 

Natalie
And now that you’ve got this absolutely new human in your life — so you and your wife just had a baby this past week, right? 

Nishant
Yeah, he’s about exactly eight days old today. 

Natalie
Oh my goodness. So we’re talking about serious formation here in terms of, like, ideas and words and pictures — is all happening in this little, little, little thing. 

Nishant
Absolutely, I think about that a lot. Like, he smiles in his sleep — like, really broad smiles. And I was thinking the other day, you know, “What could his dreams possibly be?” Like, his dreams cannot have ideas like we do because he doesn’t have words in his life yet. He doesn’t know the meanings of things. He doesn’t have a lot of images. At this age, they only see black and white images — they don’t have colours yet, and they also don’t have sharpness. I am just a blurry black and white shape, as is his mother, as are his grandparents. So what are his dreams about? There’s no jokes in it. He doesn’t know what jokes are. So there’s no dialogue, there’s no music, I assume. There’s no dynamics like we imagine. 

So is he experiencing a world that is, like, much richer than mine? It’s easy to think, “Oh, he’s not sophisticated because he doesn’t know words, he doesn’t have vocabulary.” But he’s above those things. It’s almost like we come down when we restrict ourselves to just words and these meanings. I think about that as a writer a lot, too — how words are so bad at doing this job. All our divisions in society are because of different definitions of the same words. What is healthcare? What is justice? What is punishment? What is crime? So maybe he’s in a much superior place, having not been polluted by little boxes of words. 

And I wonder what his dreams are about. So that’s one thing I have to think about when I see him smiling, because I have to watch over him because sometimes he burps in his sleep and then I have all these worries about what’s going to happen. “Is he doing something? I should pick him up, I should console him.” So I haven’t been sleeping a lot and I’ve just been staring and drawing. 

Natalie
And drawing. 

Rebecca
I loved the picture that you did in the hospital room. It was such a raw… as you said, because we’ve seen photos of everything, we’ve seen photos of the hospital — oh yeah. 

Nishant
The nurses were quite amazed because in this picture, I am sitting on her left side. And in between contractions, whenever they say, “Ok, you’re contracting, so push now,” that’s when I would drop my sketchbook and I would hold her leg and I would hold her head with the other arm. And then as soon as she was done, I would sit back down and I would start drawing. 

Natalie
That’s really great. So for those who can’t see this piece, that was his sketchbook of the birth. So that’s really great. 

Rebecca
Was your wife like, “Stay focused!”? 

Nishant
So the epidural really helped. 

Natalie
Oh, ok. 

Nishant
This is how she describes it. I don’t want to say, “No pain,” but she says that she could feel the pressure of having to push, but she didn’t have to feel the pain of the exit process. And I’m glad for that because I was expecting her to squeeze my hands, and a friend had told me, “Expect to possibly break a finger in the process.” So it didn’t go down that way. It was really incredible how well she did. 

Natalie
Oh, that’s great. 

Nishant
And really, like, the healthcare experience has been so good for us and I’m really glad it went smoothly. 

Natalie
Well congratulations, by the way. It’s so fun. 

Rebecca
Yeah, oh my goodness. To end, should we just do a really quick speed round? 

Nishant
Alright. 

Rebecca
You’re meant to answer these fast. Ok, the funnest thing you did or are doing today. 

Nishant
Oh, we’re visiting a lactation consultant. 

Natalie
That’s awesome. How would your siblings or a really close friend or your spouse describe you in three words? Go. 

Nishant
Oh, “Talks too much.” He definitely talks too much. 

Natalie
Perfect. 

Rebecca
What do you need to be creative? Just a blank sheet of paper and a thing to write with. 

Natalie
What is a common myth or something that people misunderstand about your profession? 

Nishant
People assume talent. People think that you’re gifted in some way, which sort of devalues not only the person but also themselves. Firstly, devalues the hard work I put in and the determination to do this thing that I was not good at. Secondly, it devalues them because they think it’s outside of their scope, it’s outside of their possibilities because they were not quote-unquote talented enough. 

Rebecca
Ok. And last one, what’s for dinner tonight? 

Nishant
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know — I don’t think about it anymore. 

Natalie
You just want to sleep. 

Nishant
Something’s going to happen. 

Rebecca
It’s not important. 

Nishant
It’s really not important. I know exactly how much milk he’s going to get. 

Rebecca
But what goes in your body — ehh. 

Nishant
Not at this point. It’s not so relevant. Luckily, my parents are visiting from India right now. So my mother is so happy to take charge of the kitchen. So we are very well fed, I have to say, but it’s not something I consciously think about anymore. 

Rebecca
Yeah, you just don’t know what it’ll be, but it’ll be good. 

Nishant
No, I don’t know what it’ll be. 

Natalie
It’s a beautiful surprise, like a close read of the world. 

Rebecca
Yeah. 

Nishant
It’s Indian food, it’s home food, it’s going to be delicious. 

Rebecca
Yeah. 

Natalie
Thanks so much for hanging out with us and sharing your sneaky art with our listeners. 

Nishant
Thank you for having me. This was a lovely conversation.