Ravi Amar Zupa considers books the best way to experience art. He has spent decades studying books about the art, mythology, religion, and history of cultures from across geography and time. Entirely self-taught, Zupa looks to works by German Renaissance printmakers, Flemish primitives, abstract expressionists, Japanese woodblock artists, and Mughal painters for inspiration. He also frequently incorporates religious iconography from Europe, Asia, and Pre-Columbian Latin America with revolutionary propaganda from around the world. With a distaste for ironic art or the thoughtless appropriation of culture, he integrates seemingly unrelated images in search of something universal. Zupa does not create any of his art digitally; everything comes from his own hand.
Ravi Amar Zupa
Articles illustrated by Ravi Amar Zupa:
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)
Pitches for Poems
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)This orientation toward stickiness explains the obnoxious prevalence of rhymes in poetry, though similar devices exist at all levels of depth beneath the surface—past the poem’s sound structure into its network of semantic echoes and “all the way down.”
Cannibals in the World to Come: Thomas Thorowgood, the New World, and the Lost Tribes of Israel
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)High up in the mountains of what is now Ecuador, Antonio Montezinos had encountered the descendants of the tribe of Reuben, who sent him back to Europe with a message of hope for the world’s Jews: “They say that the Prophecies do come to passe.”
Sun of All Suns
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)For a brief period in the early 20th century, a small group of Japanese Muslims was earnestly proposing that the future of their country was Islamic—and people in serious positions of power were listening.
Ayahuasca, the Eye, and the Ashram
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)The ashram hills beckoned me; the medicine said it was time to leave my current life and go there: we had work to do.
From the Editors: Bitter Water
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)John mentions many stars in Revelation, but the only one he gives the name of is called Wormwood.
Sunrise Alarm
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)I bought this thing because it’s a $27 orange disc of hope that the future exists, and I’ll be in it, awake.
Cataclysms to Desolate the World
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)What happened to a forest where fruit doves no longer ate fruit and dispersed seeds, a forest no longer filled with their mournful, cascading calls?
Beirut’s Unheard Omens
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)In July 2015, an unusual story made world headlines: Lebanon was experiencing a garbage crisis.
What It Means to Be Alive: An Interview with Ravi Amar Zupa
in Issue 96 | Prophecies (Jan 2021)I’ll get stuck for long periods trying to think about the right thing to put with something. Maybe Kurt Vonnegut is talking about the same phenomena and part of human life that this Hindu god represents. Not in a very direct way, but more or less they’re talking about the same part of us, of what it means to be alive.
in Issue 95 | Symptoms (Jul 2020)
Friern hospital patients, photos 1890-1910