A 20-year-old Engineering Student’s Foray Into The Business of Art
An artist with a knack for everything that relates to canvas, paints, and brushes; Vidhi Baldi is on her way to spreading her love for art from her Instagram account to across the world. Over the last 3 years, Vidhi has slowly honed her artistic skills while juggling her college education. Her interests specifically lie in landscape paintings, which help her translate messages, memories, and stories through art. Her goal is to be able to reach out to different people from different parts of the world through her art.
While conversing with us, the young artist talks about how she is a traditional oil painter who is pursuing an engineering degree in Computer Science Engineering. Vidhi is not new to the world of painting, she has always done it throughout her life but found more time for it only recently. In a search for being more productive, she also wanted to do something that brought her happiness. Leading to her start two paintings simultaneously with one of them being a Madhubani painting and another artwork based on wilderness. The artist has not stopped ever since.
When asked what inspires her, she talks about how she is only a beginner so does not have any specific styles yet, and would like to explore as much as she can. Like most of the Millenials and Gen Z generation, Pinterest and Instagram are places where she finds inspiration from. Having started to create commissioned artworks for family and friends she slowly realised that the next logical step was monetisation. Vidhi already had a few pieces sitting in her studio and gave it a shot. Vidhi fondly talks about painting landscapes, drawing inspiration from nature brings her a lot of peace.
After having a great start to her artistic journey, during July 2020 Vidhi experienced the dreaded artist’s block that lasted till December. But she persevered and came back stronger than before, kick-starting the foundation work on her website to sell more of her paintings. Creating a website can be an arduous task, but Vidhi put her computer engineering degree to use and made her website. Despite having a website, the key to success is managing and organising says Vidhi. Though she has not tried selling her artworks offline yet, she hopes it is something she can do in the post-Covid future. Though she has explored other mediums, she believes oil paintings are her specialty. The oil paintings also happen to be her best-selling commodity. Vidhi’s parents took notice once she won a competition as a child and sent her to classes to improve her skills.
We wind down to a very important question that people always wonder about, which is: Why is art expensive? Vidhi breaks it down for us and explains how most oil paints are unperishable and it is the biggest reason why we still have such historic pieces around. Storage of such pieces is crucial and requires dust-free spaces to maintain the texture of the work. The larger canvases take almost 4 to 5 months to finish, so that is an incredible amount of toil that an artist goes through to bring you their creations. Thus, justifying the cost of art today and forever.
Coming to business, Vidhi tells us how she would love a good balance of commissioned work and creating art that inspires her. She went on to show us a lot of her beautiful pieces that are all featured on her Instagram account and her shop on the Windo App. The range of sizes her paintings are available in varies from 5 inches to 5 feet. She believes she needs to diversify her audience and create a large target market in the future. Her advice for people in a similar place as her is to explore the creation and have a polished product. Create for what brings you joy and then eventually plan to monetize when you know you are good at it says Vidhi.
You can shop for Vidhi Baldi’s paintings on our app by tapping here. If you run a small business or know someone who runs one, do get in touch with us at team@windo.com or simply DM us on Instagram.
At Windo, we are attempting to curate all small businesses and help them set up shop under the Windo Seller App. We are attempting to create a Shopify alternative, an Etsy alternative, and a free-to-use alternative for online shopping. Windo helps you create an online shop and provides you with a payment gateway, shipping, assistance and so much more. Creators and influencers who have Instagram shops can now use the Windo App to sell to their customers.
