My name is Youwatie Kalicharan, I am currently in the Graphic Arts Production program at New York City College of Technology. One of my goals is to gain more experience within Advertisement and the Graphic Arts to help me market and grow the business I am currently running, Creations By Wattie, The website I created for my business is www.wattiespaintings.com. I sell Hindu-inspired paintings, bead paintings and other hand-make crafts created by me on this site and I thought that this program would help influence new ideas as well as help me maintain my business.
My goal is to simply maintain my business. The Hindu religion was a great impact on my art work. I have not studied many artist but inspiration came from my heritage; My family came from the West Indies and our ancestors came from India who were Hindus. The Hindu religion is all about teaching life lessons and showing one how to find ones self in a spiritual light. Art in Hinduism is how many of us express a message or a lesson that we are trying to get across to someone. While growing up and learning about my religion I found the artwork to be the interesting and I took that idea and re-created it were everyone could create their images of gods they would like to pray to and I would create it for them and they can wear jewelry the gods as well.
Often many wonder why Hindus have so many gods and goddess, the reason for that is each one of the god were created by someone’s desires, for example if I were in India and I was a guru but I was feeling very sickly and I’m praying to god but the god I’m praying to help me just for my sickness has no identity what I would do is give that god an identity. The god would be a female her name is Ganga because the Ganga river in India is said to cure sickness and she would be the goddess people would pray to her if they needed to be cured. Each god was made up that way and were given identities, but religion is such a touchy topic people don’t like to ask questions or really understand what its really about so I give others the opportunity to do so through art. I have taken a Rastor Vector class which taught me Photoshop and InDesign and I have also taken typography, publication media and I am now taking type two and graphic communications which is something new to me cause I am not sure what to expect in this class.
