Painting Outside the Lines Again

One of my earliest memories of engaging with art is using paints out of those mini paint pot strips, and every time I think of them, all I can recall is their chemically earthy, chalky smell. Another thing I can recall is how every time my paints ended up getting mixed, I would always end up with five black paint pots and disappointedly wonder why I didn't get a rainbow. As kids, all of us have been forced to engage with art as part of the curriculum (and with hopes, that one of us may turn out to be a prodigy). But whether we ended up carrying these ambitions forward or not, art did help make all our childhoods much more colourful to remember.

Maybe, that is why in the modern wave of reviving the time before the smartphone was actually smart, a lot of adults like us are deliberately trying to reconnect with our hobbies. And, not just any hobbies, most of these hobbies always circle back to art. Colouring books are popular again; flip phones have been revived(presenting a second chance to Nokia for its long awaited comeback); crocheting, knitting are cool now; pictures feel better on a low- quality digital camera; making disproportional figurines out of play dough is the new pastime. All this and more, just to find the permission to let our imaginations run wild again, not as an escape, but as a way to return to a version of us, not yet tainted by normative thinking and fried up by doomscrolling.

For the artists of our generation, nostalgia is not just a feeling, but it is a long-lost path back to ourselves, where we had more trust on our judgements, where our intuition became our biggest guide and our ideas were unfiltered and unique; and our voice, always honest and unafraid. Our childhood was the last time, we didn't care about the gaze of the internet and how to cater to it. It was the last time, we created freely, with pink whales, blue clouds, multicoloured flowers and a rainbow with more than seven colours. It was the last time we weren't scared of painting outside the lines.

Tim Burton puts it best:
“Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.”

For a generation obsessed with nostalgia and the past's revival, art with nostalgic sentiments becomes especially important to help centre the emotions that people are unable to name, yet long for. Not every familiar art feels nostalgic, but some unfamiliar artworks can surprisingly evoke nostalgia and longing for what never was. So, in order for an art work to deliver that effect reliably, artists try to portray scenes the way an old memory would make them appear in our heads. Luckily, its all a blur, and not a lot of it is accurate, but it is beautiful none the less. This beauty mostly lies in the use of bright colours(or faded hues),certain seasons, or times of the day, characters embodying strong positive emotions, lights playing around and some elements that are left to the viewers imagination. Holly Warburton's use of light and colours in her works embody this nostalgia beautifully. Similarly, some of artist Poulomi Bose's works also have beautiful play of light and colour that evoke that sense of bittersweet familiarity and longing to experience a moment once more(yes, even when you've never experienced it before).

Holly Warburton (top) and Poulomi Bose (bottom), both utilising the play of light and colour that feels like memory itself.

Nostalgia is one of those emotions that cannot be separated from the artist, the artwork or even the spectator. It always has a way of showing through. Recently, I have been seeing a lot of artists on YouTube revisit their childhood selves through self-portraits, childhood sketchbook tours, or reimagining and drawing their childhood artworks. It almost feels like a quiet act of paying homage to their braver, more curious selves, the ones that had not yet been tamed by the world.

Perhaps that is why nostalgic art resonates so deeply. It reminds some of us of the homes, people and moments we once had. For others, especially those whose childhoods were not happy ones, it offers something equally valuable: a feeling of home that may have never existed, but somehow still feels real. Nostalgia, then, is not always about returning to the past. Sometimes, it is about imagining the past we wish we had.

Every artwork carries a fragment of the artist's imagination, and that imagination is, in some way, shaped by the memories that made them. Maybe revisiting those memories is more important now than ever. In a world increasingly driven by mass production, algorithms and endless consumption, nostalgia quietly reminds artists to return to what is deeply personal, imperfect and undeniably human. Perhaps that is where art finds its most honest voice.