There is always an audience for your art. It's easy to think there is none, but that's just in your head.
Summary: Srishti Madaan (@srishtea.madaan) is a multidisciplinary artist who built a sustainable career through unconventional methods, murals, and community workshops. She did not attend traditional art schools and is completely self-taught. Srishti relied on offline networking and grit rather than traditional gallery systems or social media algorithms. She explains her perspective and talks about her creative journey in conversation with the founder of Dezi, Nitya Mehrotra.
Srishti Madaan's works span across abstract canvas paintings, scrap material workshops, and large-scale murals. Even without formal art education, she built her creative career entirely through experimentation with new ideas and a firm belief in herself. Her art draws deep inspiration from spirituality and space, often featuring galaxies in her paintings.
Finding an Artistic Identity
Speaking with Nitya about her first connection with art, she tells how growing up in Rohtak, Haryana in India, she felt isolated from the majority of the crowd around her. When as a kid, she won prizes in art competitions, it boosted her confidence. Art became a place where she could lose herself and stop thinking about everything else. In high school, the struggle with finding her place in the world continued until one day when her father bought her canvases and brushes, encouraging her to paint again. Reflecting on that moment profoundly, she expresses an important lesson:
As an adult, I've realized the opposite of depression is expression, and if you're not expressing, it gets to you and leads to depression. When I started expressing again, it helped. Since then, I've known this is something I'll carry for the rest of my life.
Her favourite art piece, My Old Self is Dying and the New One is Being Birthed From the Ashes, resonates with her spiritually connected self and resembles where she stood in life. Instead of pre-planning a painting, she let the painting follow her stream of consciousness. She describes the process as, "It truly felt like the old version of me processing death, with a new version beyond it that I don't yet know the shape of." When the world stops making sense, art does.
How to Build an Audience Without Social Media or a Gallery
When Nitya asked about how she practically sustains her career, Srishti explains how she never stuck to one single niche. Instead, she pursued her interests and curiosity. She experimented with scrap material, made canvas paintings, some of which received high praise, and she made connections through them. The idea for the workshop arrived with a simple question: "How cool would it be if everyone could come together and make lamps from metal and fabric scraps?" She developed a series of workshops that were loved by the people, including a rock-painting workshop in Goa and digital collage workshops.
She built her audience purely through a domino effect of real human interaction. If twenty-five people attended a workshop and loved it, they brought fifteen more the next time. She tells Nitya, "One thing I've learned: There is always an audience for your art. It's easy to think there is none, but that's just in your head. Even on social media, if you have 5,000 followers, a lot are inactive, but even ten people out of a thousand who genuinely care can open a door to another 20, then another 30."
Advice for Emerging Artists
Srishti emphasizes that an artist must prioritize being happy first and sustainable second by finding their natural flow state. According to her, talking to people beyond social media is essential. Currently stepping away from social media herself, she notes that competing against algorithms is a trap.
Ignore social media for a second and talk to as many people as you can offline about what you do. Go up to anyone, a stranger, a grandfather, anyone, and share what you believe in or what you're creating. It creates the same domino effect you're chasing on social media, except through real, physical connection...
Srishti strongly suggests that a long career requires immense grit and strong self-belief. Believing you are a talented artist gets you most of the way there, and opportunities follow when you put your full energy into your work. She believes that an artist should not stop experimenting until the mind, soul, and body tell them what comes most naturally to them. Whatever comes most naturally is what's meant to take you the farthest. And thus an artist is "a vessel for something that already wants to come out; you just need to find where it flows best. When you're flowing, you're happy, and everything else follows."
Furthermore, Srishti highlights the importance of listening to other artists' stories and knowing what others have done and learned. This makes things significantly easier because art is a "choose-your-own-adventure kind of industry. Knowing everyone else's adventure makes it a little easier to find your own."
Getting a UK Art Visa and Showing Work Abroad, Solo
When Nitya asked Srishti how her mural art practice began, she explained it started as a simple barter. While staying at a hostel in Pushkar, she was offered to paint a mural in exchange for free accommodation. That volunteer project connected her to another hostel in Jaipur, eventually leading to a thriving mural practice.
With an ambition to visit London, she applied to an international art exhibition for Holy Art Gallery. After being selected, she researched the UK government visa website herself, built an online portfolio to secure a Permitted Paid Engagement Work Visa, and funded her trip to display her paintings internationally. And that was the only application she ever submitted, which led her to a full month in London, showing her paintings internationally.
Srishti's creative career is an embodiment of the fact that you do not require a formal education, traditional gallery representation, or a massive online following to be a thriving artist. Her ideas reflect a poignant philosophy that makes you want to believe in yourself before others. In the art industry, Srishti says that not many people can say that their career sustains them and also empowers their soul every day. Therefore, she suggests that artists find their own flow that doesn't make them feel like they are competing with anyone but just creating for themselves. She believes it is remarkable to reach a point of contentment with what you are making, both as an artist and as a human being.