“A choreography of text and image”
Sept 2023
Shreyas R Krishnan and Jay Buchanan in Conversation
Shreyas R Krishnan is an illustrator-designer at Washington University in St. Louis. Shreyas makes non-fiction comics, zines, and documentary drawings. Shreyas was trained in graphic design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and holds an MFA in Illustration Practice from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. She founded and co-organizes Bad Drawing Club and is an Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.
Jay Buchanan is a curator, poet, and historian of modern and contemporary art. He is a doctoral student in Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. Jay’s research centers on states of encounter in global contemporary art, bridging performance studies, queer studies, and histories of infrastructure, industry, and consumption. Jay’s scholarship and criticism appear in ASAP/J, Chiricú, Theatre History Studies, and Miranda.
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Shreyas R Krishnan, from Mnemosyne
Shreyas R Krishnan’s illustration and design projects often take up questions of memory and the formations of identity, with particular attention to the intersections of visual culture and gender. Shreyas’s Mnemosyne, a short comic in spare lineation, centers the visual idiom of the library as a house of memory. Her comic Standards reflects on the depiction of women throughout the history of art. Other illustration projects like Alphabreasts (with Akhila Krishnan, for Gender Bender 2018), an A-Z guide to anatomy and culture practices surrounding breasts, and a report for the environmental action group Ashoka Trust for Research and Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) take a more didactic angle, using the visual to enhance the communicative power of writers’ and activists’ work, but still express Shreyas’s vital feminist politics. Commissions include many delightful highlights; I’m especially fond of a sweet and poetically-captioned 2015 six-frame illustration for Teabox.
Shreyas R Krishnan, “My Cups of Tea,” for Teabox: While It Sleeps (2015)
As an art historian focusing on contemporary queer feminisms myself, I find especially fascinating Shreyas’s quasi-documentary sketchnotes practice, the more informal drawing by which she expresses her thoughts and perceptions as she navigates the world. Some of the sketchnotes demonstrate Shreyas’s longstanding contemplation of art histories; a fun set pose sharp-witted humorous rejoinders to such feminist art giants as the Guerrilla Girls and Tania Brughera. Shreyas also adopts an impressionistic tack in sketchnotes on an anti-Trump protest and a whimsical, quotation-heavy approach to portraits of mentors and colleagues in the illustration profession. Sketchnotes from the 2016 MICA Constitution Day symposium demonstrate her deep criticality around the topics of migration and human movement.
Shreyas R Krishnan, sketchnotes on Guerrila Girl Frida Kahlo @ Baltimore Museum of Art
Shreyas’s knowledge base is wide-ranging and her projects find many audiences, from women and girls everywhere to the blogosphere to the NGO world to students in the classroom to her future self. In this conversation for REMAKE, Shreyas and I focused less on individual projects and political priorities and more on topics personal, practical, and philosophical in nature. In the exchange that follows we discuss Shreyas’s artistic origins and influences and how she understands “style.” The illustrator also shares some of what she hopes her viewers might take away from their time with her work, and what her students might take away from their time under her tutelage.
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JB: I’d love to know what places mean something to you, but I welcome you to think about this question in BIG terms. So no need to feel inhibited by geography or your residential history, though of course these are relevant in some sense. Where’s home?
SRK: I was born and raised in Chennai, India. Apart from Chennai I have lived in Ahmedabad (for undergrad), Milan (exchange semester), Bangalore (where I worked as a graphic designer), Baltimore (grad school and one year of teaching), and now St. Louis (teaching at WashU). My parents and my oldest friends are in Chennai, so it continues to be capital H Home and the place I have the most history with.
JB: Talk to me about your artistic education, broadly conceived.
SRK: I studied graphic design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, with an exchange semester at Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, where I focused on data visualization. I like to file my years after undergrad working at Trapeze, a design studio in Bangalore, India under “education” as well because learning to work as a professional designer is a very different experience from learning the foundational skills required for a designer. At Trapeze, I designed long-form books alongside other shorter print projects—it was a formative experience in how I think about content and narrative in nonfiction even today.
Although I really enjoyed book design, I started feeling like I needed to step away from graphic design to understand my work as an illustrator. Some context: in India, there are illustration courses within design and applied art programs, but no undergrad or graduate illustration programs offered as far as I know. To try to be an illustrator in a design studio often meant being a chameleon, producing illustrations based on the visual language that a project or client needed. I wanted to know what my authorial voice as an illustrator could be.
I saved up to pay the application fees and applied to MFA illustration programs in the U.S. and studied at the MFA Illustration as Practice program at Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. I spent my first year at MICA wondering if I had made too big a gamble in moving to the other side of the world and trying to jump ship to illustration. But the program opened me up to a whole host of possibilities for what illustration can look like, be and do, and helped me come to terms with my affinity for non-fiction illustration over other kinds of content. I also realized that I was happier being an illustrator who could design, rather than a designer who could illustrate.
JB: How do you distinguish your practices of illustration and visual journalism? Or do you see these practices as unified?
SRK: I began using “visual journalism” as a term to categorize my sketchbook practice which is almost entirely on-site documentary drawings and notes. These drawings do take on the voice of a visual journalist in that I investigate where I am and what is happening around me through drawing and recording observations and conversations, but ultimately I think they are more for me to learn from and less for others. Sometimes this method is just my way of being present at a location or event, and at other times it is active visual research and resource material for what will eventually become an illustration or comic.
JB: Are there specific visual motifs, forms, images, colors, etc. that sustain you, or keep coming up in your creative mind? Are there any “easter eggs” in your work?
SRK: Things I see around me in the world will often make their way into my illustrations, but I don’t consciously include these as easter eggs in my work. There are definitely a lot of visuals that I repeat though. I tend to draw close ups of hands a lot—hands holding things, hands in action, hands as a way to introduce a human presence, hands as a metaphor. When I draw female bodies they are always with body hair. Recently, I have been drawing wonky versions of digital things—text bubbles, browser windows, icons. Something I definitely do when I make comics is when things become panels, like devices, digital interfaces, objects. It’s not something I intentionally set out to do, like, “I will make this leaf a panel.” It probably comes from how I think about page layouts and composition as a designer.
JB: Can you speak a bit to your style?
SRK: Anytime I use the word “style,” my hands go up automatically to do air quotes. We use “style” as a shorthand for here’s what this thing looks like because it just came out of this person, but a lot of it is really the consequence of people producing work under different constraints. That could include methods, availability of inks and supplies, costs, time, or something else. We forget that “style” is the result of choices and discoveries that people make and cultivate through what is available and accessible to them. Through repetition, this becomes muscle memory; the ability to bring together tools, ideas, and technology in specific ways. “Style” of course is also a product of taste, and all the baggage that is attached to how we acquire tastes in things.
JB: OK, I suppose that’s a fair stipulation about “style!” I mean to engage you on the formal qualities that make your work your own, though. I'm struck by the way your work balances orderly lines with evidence of the images’ making. Your illustrations do not eliminate evidence of the artist's proverbial hand altogether, but I sense that clarity—of both form and idea—is paramount in many of your illustrations. Does that feel right?
SRK: I think I understand what you’re getting at. I was taught to draw by making guiding lines, drawing lightly before “finding the line.” It’s a valid way of thinking through drawing, but it just made me tentative and fearful of committing to the marks I was making on the page. This process of searching for the line involves decision-making, but it can be a space of comfort that’s really hard to get out of. I am a big supporter of making 100 quick drawings instead of endlessly reworking one. There’s a lot more I can learn from making the same drawing over and over again, with an actual record of each iteration in the process. When I draw in my sketchbooks I do not use pencils, and when I do I use them the way I would use a marker: opaque and definite.
When I make illustrations and comics, I first sketch in similar ways, making multiple drawings and sketches in pen until I arrive at the one that works or collaging pieces that work together into a base drawing that I can build on. Once I have this in place, using either a lightbox or working digitally, I start painting/inking on newer pieces of paper, eventually scanning everything in to assemble (and sometimes color) digitally. It’s akin to a process like screen printing in many ways, where you build an image in layers and a keen understanding of how those layers will interact with each other. Taking a screenprinting course in grad school really helped me solidify my current workflow.
Shreyas R Krishnan, from Becoming Rosie: Rosie the Riveter and Performative Gender
JB: As a comic illustrator, how do you approach the visuality, or the visibility, of text as a part of your practice? I always find the readymade framing of gutters and the like really interesting, and different artists approach these page-structuring devices in such different ways.
SRK: For me, a comic is a choreography of text and image, and their relationship is critical. What does the text do that the image is not? What can the image do that the text cannot? When do they both need to do the same thing? While making a comic, I negotiate these questions by simultaneously writing and drawing different segments. Sometimes I draw tiny page layouts or panel ideas in the margins of a printed script, or draw thumbnails of panels in my sketchbook, or even just move around text and empty squares/rectangles on an InDesign file until I have found a balance. A quick test I do is to strip my comics of either text or image—if either of them is fully understandable without the other, then I am not doing it right. Any text I leave on the page is there because it absolutely needs to be there, and its placement and treatment aids that.
My history as a graphic designer comes into play when making these decisions, whether it is hand lettering text to make it more image-like (toying that line between what is text and what is image), or designing how the text is placed so it cues us in on something else (is it an email? a newspaper headline?), or simply ensuring the choice of type and illustration both work together as a cohesive visual language.
JB: Speaking to history, context, and place… Who are some of your influences? What are some of your own formal preoccupations?
SRK: The works I admire usually have two big things going on for them. They are confidently and assertively analog, and they are unconcerned with making things look “realistic.” I absolutely love the works of Maira Kalman, Marjane Satrapi, Prabha Mallya, Rajini Perera, and KG Subramanyan. I’m also utterly mesmerized by textile and ceramic traditions that have been passed on through generations.
JB: And then to turn the tables a little bit, what are some influences you hope to have? That is, what is one thing that you hope every student you teach learns from you?
SRK: Independent critical thinking! A large part of my teaching approach (in the Communication Design program and MFA Illustration & Visual Culture program at Sam Fox School) revolves around equipping students to grow their creative communities and sustain their practice, armed with the skills and ability to critically think about their work, even after leaving the structure of school, projects, and regular critiques. A close second on this list of things I hope my students learn from me is naming all files and layers appropriately because it actually makes their lives easier. If you’re someone with more than one “Final” and no date or version number on their file name, don’t talk to me!
JB: Ha! The fundamentals are so important! But we can’t end this conversation on file-naming conventions, so how about a real hardball? When did you know that you’re an artist? How?
SRK: Oh, this is a question I have no direct answer for! I did not always draw, or feel like a creative person, growing up. Maybe I was more interested in what packaging looked like than anything else—I used to collect candy wrappers that I thought looked cool and remember trying to “redesign” toothpaste packaging on MS Paint to look more like what I would want! [chuckling] Lots of very bright colors. I think I arrived at design not because I knew I wanted to be a designer, but because I knew I didn’t want to be an engineer or doctor or accountant and so on. (Fun fact: At age 6, briefly, I wanted to be “chief chef” because I was obsessed with the TV show Yan Can Cook).
A few years into being a graphic designer, I realized that image-making felt more natural to me as a language to narrate in. I kept trying to work illustration into all my design projects—and would. I made my first comic around this time, and the process felt like I’d unlocked a way of communicating that was specific to me and did not feel like a struggle. Part of this process of figuring out “my thing” has also compelled me to be specific about the terms I use to describe my practice—I am not an artist, I am an illustrator. Some of this is semantics of course, but I think the way we categorize practices and work (as design, or illustration, or art and so on) bears on how we study and understand their contexts, histories, and futures. Looking back now, it is more obvious to me that my path to illustration might have been shorter if I’d learnt some of these things about myself sooner, but epiphanies happen when they happen because our understanding of self/situation reaches a critical mass, so it’s okay to let things take their own time.
Shreyas R Krishnan, “K is for Kannagi” for Alphabreasts