With fast muscle cars and racing bikes in supersonic motion,it makes sense for Bobby Sandhu to title his first exhibition in the city as Pencils in the Fast Lane. The self-taught artist,actor and writer has put up quite a display at IFMs Art Portfolio in Sector 9,which he calls fan art. Its a new-age art form in celebration of an idol in mass culture, says the pencil-sketch artist,who has also posted poetic lines describing his art at the bottom of each picture. Sketching,he says,came naturally to him,and he has been doing it since childhood. Ive never been to any art school, he says. The gallery walls have many of his pictures in black and white and cloudy greys of 67 Shelby Mustang Fastbacks,American muscle cars,Johnny Depp as Mad Hatter,Angelina Jolies seductive look,vacant eyes of Kurt Cobain and even Heath Ledger as the Joker. He refuses to accept the pictures as copycat art. Everything is a copy of everything, he says. The mechanics of my heart are hard to decode,it rattles and grinds,creating non-existent sounds,my eyes drain,devoid of emotion,moving around aimlessly,I paint an image of my pain: Sandhu reads out the lines written below a sketch. Also a writer and actor (he wrote the screenplay and dialogue for Punjabi film Bikar Bai Sentimental),Sandhus got more than 20,000 followers online. He first exhibited the works earlier this year in Australia. All set to work on a coming-of-age Punjabi film about four friends,Sandhu says he will be back with more sketches. It takes time like the Johnny Depp one took 60 hours, he says,as the projector in the room plays a video of him sketching really fast. The exhibition is on till June 29
