LURU Hangs w/ illustrator & comics maker Priya Kuriyan

Drawing a line takes time.

“You don’t tend to open the refrigerator for a reward each time you finish something. There’s some resistance,” quips Priya Kuriyan.

Priya was speaking to us – the LURU newsletter team – on how artists’ studios allow for “the separation of work and personal life.” She recalls moving into her present space on a leafy lane in Cooke Town awashed with the most beautiful morning light “about five years back” when her architect partner opened up his new digs “and then I saw this extra space, I was like, I want.”

Draw-dropping moments

On this midweek morning, we dropped in on Priya working on her latest project “on the origins of Indian cinema but for children” for the Film Heritage Foundation, a Mumbai-based not-for-profit organisation with “very passionate people” dedicated to supporting the conservation, preservation, and restoration of the moving image. She speaks to the depth of research that goes into illustrating this “slightly unusual, large-format, non-fiction book.” She starts off with “looking through so much material” that involves a “lot of decision-making.” She speaks to choices like looking at a photograph from the 1920s, finding it interesting, but being unsure if she would be able to include it in the flow of the final narrative. “And there’s this sort of hesitation of whether to use that reference or not, or find another. So, I’m in that process of just collecting a lot of references, and making rough sketches and layouts,” she says. She finds this time in a project “really, really exciting” because she keeps coming across fascinating tangents. She’s learned about films being “found in somebody’s attic” or randomly in a marketplace, and other stories from the folks at the film foundation.

Over the past decade, this ability to deep dive into grown-up information, sift through it, translate and illustrate it for children has become a part of Priya’s wizardry. “The thing is you don’t want to lecture a kid. You treat them as intelligent people and don’t spoon-feed them,” she says. Priya isn’t interested in creating hagiographies but rather in presenting the complexities of a person’s life in an interesting way. The most compelling part of this focus “of making non-fiction, or even making fiction, has been presenting a person with all of their vulnerabilities,” she states. This has been the guiding principle of Priya’s practice since Indira, her debut non-fiction comics’ project for young adults in collaboration with author Devapriya Roy.

Soon, we are poring over Priya’s hand-drawn sheets from the Indira project. We’re engrossed by this detailed illustration of the city of Allahabad. She went with “this aerial view of Allahabad” while it might not be “a geographically accurate map” it provided the backdrop for the “creating of these fictional elements of people talking about her and passing on information” on who the daughter of the Prime Minister was marrying. In order to create this illustration, Priya “would go take pictures of different parts of Allahabad” and the result is an amalgamation of those photographs. “This geography would perhaps not exist there, but it is, when you look at it, it definitely reminds you of the place,” she explains.

A stroke of genius

From these recent projects, we flashback to Priya’s early projects. She sorts through her cupboards neatly stacked with books divided into copies of her own work and those that inspire her. She pulls out the Chinese translation of her first book from the Baby Bahadur series from over two decades ago. “The first of the lot is a story about an elephant who forgets how to sleep and it follows this very sweet picture book format where he goes to different animals and asks them how they sleep, and in the end, he’s so tired he sleeps himself,” she explains. And with each book, the central character “is a different animal.” Looking back at her past work stirs up memories. “You know, it’s so funny, you only see mistakes and I mean it’s a bit embarrassing also,” she admits. “I used to draw elements separately on different pieces of paper and then put it all together on Photoshop. And I used terribly cheap paper, I think I made this whole thing on copier paper,” she adds. “And yeah, you can see bits of white edges. But I think children are more forgiving.”

Next, we’re talking about her work on filmmaker Devashish Makhija’s When Ali Became Banjrangbali which she remembers as “actually having a layer of politics” in the text. While most of us might think of children’s books as “oh-so-cute, but there are many layers that can be added to it,” she reminds us. In order to bring out the Mumbai in Devashish’s text, she decided to make the tree kind of look like a chawl [tenement buildings], so “visually we tried to do that with these little balconies with different animals within those balconies,” she explains. “So, there was a layer of that politics in this book. Again, it’s not in your face but a book is also a shared experience between a parent and a child. So really there’s that space for having a conversation when you’re reading out a book to your child,” she adds. “And children are different. They might get the idea, they might not get it but that’s okay. But as a creator, one adds those things to it.”

She breaks down these similar choices for her own book Beauty Is Missing like wanting “an alliterative name like Pete Parker for her female constable Jincy Jose,” or the artistic liberty of using an old police jeep, or “Suresh Gopi who always kind of acts as this really macho cop from old Malayalam films because there was a sense of nostalgia in it,” she describes. And she shows other stops along the way of the process: “the sketches and her little notes” that she employs to build out “the structure of the story.” We get a peek at the storyboard on “how the text and the image is sort of coming together” and while “nobody [else] can understand it, it shows me what I’m thinking of,” she explains.

Chalking it up to experience

For Priya, most of her drawings and illustrations, especially for her characters, come from never being “bored at an airport or any public space” because she “really enjoys watching people.” And she’s always making “character sketches of people” and so, she has a “collection of people” to bounce off of for her books because “watching is drawing” for her. While other people might observe another person, in Priya’s head, she’s “actually drawing that person by just observing that person. Because a lot of drawing really happens, I feel, in my head. I mean, my hand is just like an extension of what I’ve seen,” she says.

“I feel like there are different ways to draw and to observe,” she says. “And I try and practice both of them. And I don’t think there’s a day in my life where I haven’t drawn. And that is something that I really enjoy,” she adds. “I love watching people.”

Follow Priya’s work here.

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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly LURU Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.