My name is Ishaan, and I'm a conceptual artist from Allahabad, India. I come from a science background, but somewhere along the way, I realized that the world I was being pushed toward wasn't the world I actually wanted to live in. So I made a choice. I left science, picked up a brush, and never looked back. That decision wasn't just about making art. It was about making sense of things.

Over the past 10+ years as an artist, I've come to believe that what the internet and social media show us about art, and about what it means to be an artist, is deeply misleading. We're surrounded by content that reduces art to technique, to aesthetics, to how many followers you have. And somewhere in all that noise, the actual soul of art gets lost. My work tries to find that soul again. It's not just about what something looks like. It's about what it means — the imagination behind it, the emotion that drives it, the concept it carries, the philosophical depth it holds, the message it leaves behind. That, to me, is what separates a picture from a piece of art. And that's what I try to teach.

Being self-taught isn't special on its own — honestly, 9 out of 10 artists are self-taught. The real question is: what did you teach yourself? If everyone learned the same thing on their own, what's the point? Copying references is an important part of learning, yes, but if that's where you stop, you haven't really begun.

To understand art more deeply, I started reading widely: philosophy, epistemology, literature, music, history, politics, sociology, psychology, and religious scriptures from different traditions. I also spent time learning languages: English, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, not to be impressive, but because each language opens a different window into how human beings think and feel.

I'm also a musician. I've been playing tabla for over 16-17 years, with 20+ awards and certifications to my name. Music and art have always lived side by side in my life, both are languages that say things words can't.

On the art side, I've exhibited in Delhi and Allahabad, sold paintings, explained my work to some very influential people (including politicians and ministry officials), given several interviews, worked as a digital artist on a few series, won national art contests, and contributed to a book called Fourteen to Forty, published worldwide in 2020-21.

I don't consider myself a big scholar. I'm just someone who asked a lot of questions and kept searching for honest answers. And because I've been lucky enough to find many of those answers, I became a teacher. Not to show off what I know, but to share what I have, in the hope that every next learner will understand better than the previous one.