The Hands Behind the Art

Meet the Artists

Every piece at ARTVIK begins with a person. Here are the stories of the artists whose work you're bringing home.

Shravan Rathod

Born in Vasai, Maharashtra, India

Shravan Rathod

Art was never about perfect lines for me, it was about learning to see, to feel, and to listen to my own hand. My journey began at Vasai Vikasini Robin D'silva Art College, where I completed my Foundation and earned my Art Teacher Diploma with First Class honours. I am currently pursuing my Master's in Fine Arts at Rishikesh Chitrakala Mahavidyalaya, Panvel.

Alongside my own practice, I have spent years teaching young artists, first at St. Willibrord High School, and now through my independent studio. Watching a student mix a colour they actually meant, or measure a line with their own eye for the first time, has shaped how I see my own work too. Every painting I make still carries that same instinct: to look closely, and to let the hand follow what the eye has understood.

— Shravan Rathod

Arun Maruti Peje

Vasai, Maharashtra

Arun Maruti Peje

I paint the small things. A hand resting on a table, the particular quiet of a Sunday afternoon, a moment between two people that most would forget within the hour. These are the things I have always noticed, long before I called myself an artist for a living.

For a while, I doubted that noticing was enough to build a life around. Two group shows had come and gone. People responded to the work, stood in front of it, talked about it, but nothing sold. By the last day of the second show, I had started to wonder if painting was even the right path for me.

Then someone bought a painting. Not from Mumbai, not from anywhere nearby. A buyer in Germany, on the final day, on what was supposed to be a quiet close to a difficult run. It was my first sale. It was enough to keep going.

I trained at Sir J. J. School of Art in Mumbai, specializing in printmaking and mural design, and my work has since traveled well beyond that first Berlin sale, shown at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Chemould Prescott Road, White Square Gallery in Berlin, and the Embassy of India in Berlin. In 2015, I received the Maharashtra State Exhibition Award.

None of that changes what I actually believe my art is for. Not for a gallery crowd, not for a particular class of collector. For ordinary people, wherever they happen to be standing when they see it. Sometimes, it turns out, that's a stranger in Germany, willing to take a chance on a painter on the last day of a show that almost didn't work out.

— Arun Maruti Peje

Abhijeet Dandawate

Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India

Abhijeet Dandawate

I paint culture. I paint emotion. I paint what it means to be human.

My first exhibition happened almost by accident, a school competition I entered without much thought. When the results came back, mine had been chosen. I remember that as the moment I first understood art could actually reach people, not just sit on a wall.

I studied at Vasai Vikasini College of Art for my A.T.D., then completed my G.D. Art and Diploma in Art Education at Mudra College of Fine Art in Mumbai, training that shaped how I think about color and composition even now.

Before I ever pick up a brush, I sit with the canvas for a few minutes in silence. I paint the whole picture in my mind first. Every work you see here began that way, fully imagined before a single color touched the surface.

What I love most is chasing the feeling of Indian folk life, mythology, music, and everyday tenderness between people, and finding a way to put all of that into one frame. Some days it is a horse mid stride. Other days it is a quiet domestic moment. The thread through all of it is the same. Color, for me, says things words cannot.

I want you to feel peace when you look at my paintings. Warmth. A sense of belonging. A little piece of India's soul, and maybe, your own story, hidden somewhere in the colors.

My hope is simple. That these paintings travel further than I ever will, into homes across the world, carrying a bit of home with them wherever they land.

— Abhijeet Dandawate