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Pop art from photographs

Photo: K. Ananthan

His cheer is infectious and his office is vibrant with the attitude and adventure of a college canteen. Grinning from behind his huge computer screen he says, “The tea can’t be bad here, (be)cause you’re gonna make it.”

Meet P. S. Vinay Kumar: engineer, manager, entrepreneur, and pop artist. Vinay makes a living out of recreating photographs into pop art. “We work,” says Vinay, “with the best models- You!”

Vinay takes photos, not clicked by professionals in studios, but by amateurs; by common people armed with ordinary cameras and camera-phones. Impromptu expressions can never be captured in a studio, he explains. “Every picture has a story.” Any photograph or pieces of crumpled photos will do. Torn photos are fixed, the hair is adjusted and the background can be modified. Inspired by the pop art of trailblazers like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Vinay couples this nostalgia with the style of pop art to immortalize us on paper or canvas. This eliminates going to a studio for a sub-standard print you may not even like.

After his Mechanical Engineering from Kumaraguru College of Technology, Coimbatore in 1996, Vinay headed to Louisiana State University, USA to do an MBA. Straight out of B-school, he joined an auditing firm. With a salary to kill for, he travelled the continent, meeting CEOs of companies and making presentations. “I was on top of the world,” says Vinay. His creativity began to creep in to his presentations. Vinay decided to take the plunge and started a firm that handled the website of basketball star Mugsy Bogues, and cashed in on the advent of broadband by streaming church sermons online.

After the dotcom bust, Vinay returned to India and joined a private firm in 2002. But the entrepreneur in him prevailed. He created a website in December 2007 that asked users to simply type in the changes they want in the photograph and the style they want it in.

The website understands the customer’s request and instantly quotes the price. Once they click ‘yes’, Vinay’s team based in Saibaba Colony and other places in India, United States, United Kingdom and Russia, do the job and send it to the customer. You don’t pay if you don’t like it. Through a pool of over 50 suppliers in the US, customers get their product in a few days. Payments are made online.

After tasting success in North America and Europe, he started www.artu.in for Indian customers. Available on art paper, metallic finish and canvas, prices range from Rs. 600 to Rs. 8000 varying with the medium, size and style.

Photo: K. Ananthan

Vinay says that the best lesson he learnt in the US is making a delivery on time. “Time consciousness and quality are right in your face out there,” he says. He had to spend almost three to four months giving trial jobs to locate the best printers, artists and suppliers, before he started his website.“Digital art isn’t instant. We need to recreate every element of the image. It’s not a push button process,” he explains.

It was tough to get people to understand what he was doing. The only one of its kind in India, Vinay’s firm didn’t even bother pursuing a bank loan for initial capital. Explaining the viability of this concept to a bank manager is like “creating a chicken out of an egg,” he says.

“We didn’t have venture capitalists or angel investors, like in the States,” ruminates Vinay. The start-up money came from his pocket and that of his partners Sri Sethuram and Palaniappan Ramanathan, all college buddies.

Even the registrar of companies couldn’t make sense of what Vinay’s team was producing. Nevertheless Vinay started his company, Teek Wagnis Business Solutions.

For those who want to do pop art as a career, Vinay’s advice is to follow your passion and balance it off with business sense. Doing an MBA is not a prerequisite for success, but you do meet diverse gruops of people, he says.

Political posters in the west liberally use pop art in them, but here, says Vinay, “People don’t want a photo of their parents immortalized the way politicians are.” What’s unique is that he has standardized something as unique as art. “Though people get to opt for a set number of preferences, the end result is unique for each customer,” he explains, showing me the variations of shades and backgrounds used in a couple of Lichtensteins. He hopes to expand and is on the look out for franchisees.

“What’s wonderful,” he adds, “is that all this is coming out of Coimbatore.”

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