Third-year St. Thomas University student Darshini Moonesawmy is a visual artist. Moonesawmy majors in media studies and minors in film studies and criminology. She is from the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean.
Visual arts have always been a huge part of Moonesawmy’s life. She has been drawing all her life. But as a kid, she wasn’t allowed to have any type of art supplies unsupervised.
“I’d draw on everything – walls, my mom’s driver’s licence, nothing was safe,” Moonesawmy said.
The restrictions made her want to draw more, leading her to take visual arts at A-level in high school.
“I’m not very good at expressing myself with words or emotions, so art helps me do just that,” Moonesawmy said.
In her spare time, she always looks at the work of other professional visual artists like Magdalena Pagowska (Len-Yan), whom she thinks is one of the best digital artists right now.
Also, she encourages more people to get involved in visual art because artists will be hard to replace with robots in the future, so it’s good to consider the arts as a hobby or job.
However, Moonesawmy thinks people who want to get involved in visual art need to be passionate about it.
“Art is not easy, and it will be frustrating at times. It demands patience and determination,” Moonesawmy said.
She says she doesn’t plan to make drawings, paintings or photography her full-time job, but she does want to do that as freelance on the side, at her own pace. In the future she’d like to work in the film industry.
