IF you asked her what she thinks of herself, she’ll tell you that she’s just “your friendly neighbourhood programmer and painter”. She’s no Peter Parker, but she is quite animated and can take a jab at her own web-slinging.

That’s Renuka Persaud, a 19-year-old with a love for art and bringing her art to life.

She told the Pepperpot that she has been painting and drawing since she was a young girl; it’s just one of those things that always felt “right” for her. And through encouragement from her parents, she kept up traditional painting as a hobby throughout her formative years.

For her, art always felt like the ‘freest’ form of expression, since there was just to limits to what she could create. It was like whatever her mind would imagine, her hands and fingers would work in some way to conjure that. And it just worked well that she’s a huge fan of books (especially Harry Potter and science fiction), old films and nature– the possibilities for her creative scope could be widened. Her six dogs, you could say, also provide her with inspiration– when they’re not playing around with the paints on their own!

“To me, art, specifically painting, seems to transcend language, in that anyone can understand a visual, regardless of what language they speak,” she said. “Art can be unifying but it can also have unique meanings for each individual, and that’s one of the reasons why I love it and keep practising it.”

Eventually, Persaud began fiddling around with digital art. In fact, she shared that she started to try out digital painting when she 17 (barely two years ago), and later progressed to two-dimensional animation.

Whether it’s digital or traditional art, you can quite literally, tell the amount of work she puts in to make each piece a masterpiece. She took a total of 54 hours to create an intricate acrylic tiger on canvas and took about a month (during her leisure time- for the most part) to create a short animation for Machel Montano’s Toco Loco.

For Renuka also, she draws inspiration for the very many creative Guyanese youth and seasoned creators. She highlighted that sometimes she’s just blown away by the sheer talent found here.

At the same time, she expressed a bit of concern that there aren’t too many avenues for artists to promote their own art or even garner much recognition and support. One thing she would definitely like to see is a few more galleries or just places where artists would just be able to promote their work, and even earn a few dollars too.

“Understandably, building and maintaining galleries would be costly and take some time but for now I think the local art scene can be improved by having more large scale public exhibitions, especially for young creators, in order for them to build confidence in their abilities and get external and unbiased feedback outside of their network of family and friends,” she opined.

And speaking from personal experience, she highlighted that public exhibitions can be very encouraging (once you get over the initial reservations of putting your work on display, that is).

For the time being, however, on her own, Renuka will continue practising art in her leisure (and maybe not so leisure) time. And aside from that, in a few months, she will be heading off to the University of South Florida to continue studying Computer Science with the aim of becoming a Software Engineer.