As a featured presenter at SUU’s Department of Art and Design‘s weekly series, Art Insights, Arlyn Pillay will give a presentation at the Centrum Arena, section JK, on Thursday, Sept. 3, at 7 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.
A multi-faceted creative force, Pillay is an accomplished painter, illustrator, printmaker, sculptor, ceramicist, musician, writer, and entrepreneur. He started to draw at age three when his Mom, who had studied art in college, gave him his first box of crayons. His early efforts depicted his favorite cartoon characters.
He grew up in Durban, South Africa, and moved to America with his family at the age of nine, spending most of his life in southern California. After graduating from Irvine High School, he attended Cal State Fullerton for one year and transferred to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He majored in illustration with a concentration as a gallery artist. With a disciplined work ethic, he won many scholarships at Art Center and graduated in 2003.
He taught art in at a local private art school while working on various freelance projects for companies and participated in group art gallery exhibitions. Dissatisfied with the way most galleries conducted business and unsure of how to effectively bring attention to his art, Pillay soon realized that he needed an alternative and intimate space where people from around the world could view, purchase, and experiences his creations the way he envisioned. It needed to be a place that an artist had control over his creations, a place where he could totally and completely express himself without any limitations or restrictions, and so Ogreshop.com was born. Arlyn sells his work through his website and his art gallery, the Arlyn Pillay Art Gallery, located in Tustin, California.
From small drawings in his sketchbook to giant nine-foot oil paintings in his studio, the size of Pillay’s art varies greatly, and his style ranges from highly realistic portraits, cartoonish characters, and abstract shapes fused together with broad brush strokes of brightly splashed colors. As an artist, he works in oil, acrylic, watercolor, graphite, charcoal, polymer clay, modeling paste, rubber cement, ceramic clay, plastisol ink, Photoshop, pen and ink, and gouache.
Art Insights is a free weekly program hosted during the fall and spring semesters by SUU’s Art and Design faculty. Students and community members meet to experience presentations and discussions by visiting artists and art educators from around the nation who share their work and insights and attend gallery openings.
