Tadavarthy paints with passion
April 19, 2018
Senior Naya Tadavarthy wore bright, magenta-pink lipstick and an artfully vibrant skirt as she sat in the art wing and eagerly sketched her journey through art.
“[In] my whole life, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing,” she said. From using markers in preschool, to decorating the entire children’s menu at restaurants, to illustrating the sides of assignments in school, art has always been a part of Tadavarthy’s life. Her journey with art began as a pastime that she enjoyed. She started to become more involved in formal classes at the age of 11, and she now teaches at The Art Academy on Snelling, the very place where she learned to draw.
Working with children from ages 5 to 13, Tadavarthy has been teaching drawing, painting, inking, and watercolor since her sophomore year. While the work can be difficult when the kids don’t feel like behaving, Tadavarthy considers herself lucky to be able to work in something that she’s passionate about, especially as a teenager.
“I feel really grateful that I have a job where I get to not only practice my passion but share it with others,” Tadavarthy said.
Tadavarthy focuses her art in drawing and watercolor, and dabbles occasionally in colored pencil. Watercolor is the medium in which she has received the most instruction and feels most comfortable.
“Honestly, I’m pretty horrible at shading when it’s not watercolor,” Tadavarthy quipped.
She specializes her drawings and paintings in people, clothing, and fashion.
I believe that clothing can reveal the deepest truths about people and their identities. — Naya Tadavarthy
“Ever since I was little I’ve loved stories. I’ve loved to read and I’ve loved narratives, and I think I was the one kid in the 2000s who still played with paper dolls, so I would not only act out their stories but I would also design their clothes for them. So I’ve always had a combined passion for clothes and also stories, and I reflect that in my work,” Tadavarthy said.
Even today, she still pays close attention to how people are dressed in her drawings.
“I believe that clothing can reveal the deepest truths about people and their identities,” Tadavarthy said. She finds inspiration from an artistic Instagram account, @artgarments. The account curator crops oil paintings to focus on a specific part of a person’s outfit in the painting, then reveals the entire painting. For Tadavarthy, the account is a fun way to discover new art, new artists, and to appreciate fashion.
Art has been a pivotal and poignant part of Tadavarthy’s entire life, and she hopes that it will remain present in her future. While she doesn’t want to be a fine artist, she wants to be able to express herself visually; as a young child, she wanted to be a costume or fashion designer, which combines her love of narratives and her love of clothing.
“Hopefully I can do something with art professionally, but even if I don’t, I hope to carry it through as something that I keep doing for the rest of my life,” Tadavarthy said.
On “More Than Just a Pretty Face:”
“I wanted to do something about makeup and getting ready, like, that could be kind of fun, and then I started thinking about it more and was like, ‘Well, I want to put something more into this piece.’ And I started thinking about what getting ready and putting on makeup means to women, and the fact that makeup is perceived as something really superficial and something that only women who care about their appearance and nothing else wear.
And so I combined it with phrases that talk more about becoming involved with things, and speaking up and speaking out for your cause, to show that there’s not just one kind of woman who can be a part of a movement. Doing something like wearing makeup doesn’t mean that you’re not confident in yourself, it’s just about how you want to present yourself, and the makeup itself can even be viewed as a form of art—not the way I do it, because I’m not very good at it!
There’s just something about making something that adds something more beautiful to the world, even if it doesn’t necessarily have a huge meaning behind it.
— Naya Tadavarthy
I would hope [activism] would inspire more of my work. I think that, for me, I might do work like this but I definitely have a little bit more to be desired in actually getting involved in causes, so I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite. But I think that definitely [what I paint] are things that I’m passionate about, whether it’s female identity or reading and books and narratives.
And I just like creating beautiful things, too. There’s just something about making something that adds something more beautiful to the world, even if it doesn’t necessarily have a huge meaning behind it.”
Naya’s series, “More Than Just a Pretty Face,” was displayed in
On “North of Superior, 1961:”
“This is a picture of my grandma that has been hanging on a wall in her grandparents’ house for forever, and it’s a black and white photograph. And I always just thought that it was a really pretty, really glamorous picture when I was little.
I thought, ‘Oh, that’d be fun to paint it.’ A big part of it for me was that I just like how I drew it. The composition’s not me, that’s just the way the picture was taken, but then I had to add color to it and when you add color, you have to get it right or it can look kind of unnatural and odd. And I just think the way it turned out wasn’t necessarily the way I expected parts of it to turn out like I really struggled with the shirt, but it ended up looking very nice, aesthetically as a whole. So that was just a really fun process.”
This story was awarded Best of SNO.