Reframing the Productivity Narrative with the Sneaky Artist Nishant Jain

This week, we are reframing the productivity narrative with Instagram and Substack-famous sketch artist Nishant Jain — otherwise known as the Sneaky Artist. Nishant trained as an engineer, almost got his PhD, and then switched tracks to make art in public — sneakily. Now his full-time gig is sketching with a recognizable yellow fountain pen so that he can’t erase anything. He’s very committed to the line! And if you’re ever in Vancouver, you might just happen upon one of his drawings left behind in a café or a public library.

With Nishant, we talked about how he believes that everyone can be an artist and the inspiration he got from living in Chicago (where he watched a lot of bad stand-up comedy). We also unpacked productivity culture, art for art’s sake, and whether we can even have human experiences anymore without making content about them. And we heard about his new baby — who he’s now sketching too.

Nishant Jain is a writer, artist and podcaster in Vancouver. As a Sneaky Artist, he draws the people around him in the spaces he inhabits, finding moments of accidental beauty in ordinary places on ordinary days. He shares his work and ideas with thousands of readers on Substack and Instagram.

Links:
At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
For more from the Sneaky Artist, follow him on Instagram and Substack or check out his website

From this week’s episode:

All of art is a life — like, I tell people that you should make art just because it’s the most human thing you can do. There is no reason to do it. It’s just part of humanity. You have to do it in order to complete being a human being. So it has given me lessons that I did not think I would need, I did not think I would reflect upon, and I certainly did not think would apply to my life. I started using a fountain pen before I knew how to draw. I have always been a perfectionist. I’ve spent hours and hours just making the right line on my iPad. I used to draw so much on the iPad because it would allow me this freedom to undo every line so easily, and I could erase all my mistakes so comfortably — have no cost to my experiments, just undo the mistake and try again.

And I reached a point where I thought, “I keep undoing so much. I never just go with it.” And I’m also only using the iPad screen and only using the Apple Pencil, so everything feels the same. It’s just the Apple Pencil tip on this iPad screen — which is excellent, but it’s all the same, always. So I picked up a fountain pen with the idea that I want to not be able to erase a line. I just want to see what happens and I want to deal with it. I just want to make more and more drawings. I want to get to the end of them and I want to turn the page and I want to make a new one instead of worrying over the perfection of every line.

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