Were You Drawn by the ‘Sneaky Artist’?

Whether sipping your coffee or crossing the street, you might’ve been drawn by Vancouver’s Nishant Jain.

“I like to be quick,” says Jain, who makes his art from barstools and edges of sidewalks.

Jain is new to the city, having arrived eight months ago in the middle of the pandemic. Flip through his sketchbooks and you’ll see his documentation of urban life slowly picking up again, from friends meeting up for socially-distanced picnics to the joy of bustling beach days.

It was five years ago that Nishant Jain got the itch to draw. He almost dismissed it as a “silly little thing.”

An engineer by trade, Jain was undertaking a biomechanics PhD at Northwestern University, doing research with stroke patients while living in Chicago. The city fuelled his passion for the arts, everything from jazz to live comedy, to drawing the urban world around him.

“It felt weird, as a grown-up, trying to learn to draw in public,” said Jain. “But then I discovered this hashtag: #urbansketchers.”

What’s an Urban Sketcher?

In short, it is a person, any person really, that sets out to capture their environment with pen and paper, paints or conté crayon. Everyone is welcome, and you can do it wherever you might find yourself, in the downtown core or a more bucolic setting.

The movement originated with journalist Gabriel Campanario sharing his drawings. Campanario’s work for the Seattle Times may have started the ball rolling, but the idea is really as old as art itself. Humans have been drawing their lived environment since the days of cave painting. Location drawing, as it was once termed, had a documentary-like bent, with the concept being to honestly depict the time, setting and activity. The Urban Sketcher’s original manifesto included suggestions like draw on location, draw from direct observation, tell a story, and most importantly, support each other and share drawings.

The idea soon spread around the globe. In towns, villages and larger urban centres, folks took to the street with the motto of “We show the world, one drawing at a time!” Non-judgey and decidedly democratic, the notion was to make art making accessible to all, not only those deemed talented.

Vancouver has an active chapter of Urban Sketchers and even the briefest perusal of their social media offers up a bounty of lovely work.

In Chicago, Jain was encouraged to know he wasn’t drawing alone, and that he could dive into the community without experience or expensive materials. He chatted up other Urban Sketchers in person and online, all the while adding to his notebooks.

Architecture, of course, makes up the bulk of Urban Sketchers’ art, but Jain’s interest was documenting people as they went about their daily routines.

“Drawing in the world helped me build a visual vocabulary,” he said. “When I drew somebody’s nose, it was added to the bank of noses I would then know how to draw.”

Jain has since quit his PhD program to do art full time. He drew his way through a much smaller city, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, home to 68,000 people, and self-published a book there.

When he arrived in Vancouver this year, he didn’t know anything about the city. But he and his wife found waiting for permanent residency in the U.S. too uncertain, despite both of them having master’s degrees. Canada, though, quickly welcomed them.

During his quarantine, Jain made his first sketches of his new home by peering out of the window of his Airbnb on Powell Street by the inlet: trains lumbering by, a rooftop daycare, a woman who showed up everyday to feed the birds.

When two weeks were up, Jain was finally able to explore the city. He visited landmarks like Stanley Park and Granville Island, but also stoplights where he sketched pedestrians. The pandemic added a historic layer to his visual observations, from masked urbanites to the waiting room after he got his vaccines.

Like street photographers shooting candidly, Jain likes the challenge of being a “sneaky artist” with his pen and paper.

“Being quick gave me a style, to get to the meat of the drawing,” he said.

Jain has gone on to use the “Sneaky Artist” moniker for his website, Instagram and podcast, where he interviews other urban sketchers. As Jain says, drawing has become a way to better appreciate “how beautiful things are, ordinary places and ordinary people.”

It’s an idea shared by one of the grand doyennes of drawing, Betty Edwards, who is fond of saying by drawing something you learn to love it. This holds true for cities as much as it does for human faces and figures. In this way, the act of drawing might just be the ideal way to come to know a place, whether you’re brand new to the city or have lived here your entire life.

You can view Nishant Jain’s notebooks on Instagram here. You can learn more about the world’s Urban Sketchers movement on their website here.