At first glance, Akhil Anand looks like any other 14-year-old with a sketchbook. But hand him a pen and a pile of geometry, and you’ll witness something quietly radical—a mind that bends maths into mandalas, endangered animals into caped crusaders, and centuries-old art styles into modern merch. The Chennai teen calls it Akhilism—an ever-evolving world of patterns, creatures, stories, and sharp lines where art is both a canvas and a conscience.
Blame the brainy genes. Son of chess grandmaster Viswanathan Anand and arts educator Aruna Anand, Akhil grew up in a home where logic and imagination weren’t at odds—they danced together. “Numbers were never scary,” he says, casually flipping through a sketchbook of elephants reimagined as protectors of forests, each trunk curling into spirals of Fibonacci perfection. “Appa used to make me solve logic puzzles for fun, and amma always filled bedtime with stories of gods, painters, and wild animals. Somewhere in the middle, I started drawing my own versions.”
During the pandemic, when most teens were discovering banana bread and binge-watching K-dramas, Akhil stumbled into the world of pointillism—an art form that uses tiny dots to form images. “I liked how it felt like a puzzle,” he says. “You don’t know what you’re making until you step back and look at all the dots together.” The idea of Akhilism was born not just from this technique, but from a playful rhyme with pointillism. “Amma and I laughed about the word, and then we thought—why not make it a brand?” And so, Akhilism slowly grew from a doodle on a notebook to an idea that could live on mugs, bags, T-shirts, and veshtis. “It was never a plan,” he shrugs. “I just drew whatever I felt like, and then Amma said, ‘Hey, this would look great on a tote bag!’”
But don’t be fooled by the casual tone—Akhil’s work is steeped in research, heritage, and heart. From Warli stick figures dancing in moonlight to Gond-inspired animal forms layered with geometry, his pieces tap into the deep reservoir of Indian folk traditions. “Indian art is so cool,” he insists. “The lines, the storytelling… even something simple has layers.” One of his early artworks—an owl with eyes shaped like the Sri Yantra—was inspired by a trip to a village crafts mela. “I met this artisan who painted birds on clay pots and told me about symbols that protected homes,” Akhil recalls. “I went home and started doodling guardians—birds, tigers, snakes—all with shapes I had seen in maths class!”
The Hastha Foundation, an organisation that promotes socially driven art, discovered his work through word-of-mouth. “They messaged Amma on Instagram,” Akhil grins. “I thought it was spam at first!” But the collaboration turned out to be transformative. Akhil was asked to design animals for a clothing line tied to conservation. His tigers roared from veshtis, his owls blinked wisely from T-shirts, and a sleepy sloth made its way onto a line of tote bags. “I wanted the animals to have emotions,” he says. “Not just cute… more like, you look into their eyes and feel something.”
He credits much of his sensibility to his parents. His father, a world chess champion, brings home stories—and photos—from his global travels. “Appa once showed me a staircase in Prague shaped like a spiral shell,” Akhil recalls. “We talked about the golden ratio for a week after that.” His mother, meanwhile, curates his world with books, exhibitions, and artist conversations. “We don’t travel without a sketchbook and at least one storybook,” says Aruna with a smile. Akhil’s mentor, artist Diana Satish, has also been a guiding presence since he was nine. “She never tells me what to draw. She just asks questions like, ‘What would a fox look like if it lived inside a mandala?’ And then I start imagining it!”
In April this year, Akhil hosted his first solo exhibition titled Morphogenesis—a word borrowed from biology, meaning the development of form and structure. The show featured over 30 works, each blending mathematical patterns with natural forms. There was a lotus unfolding like a fractal, a deer surrounded by Venn diagrams, and a whale whose spine was mapped like a number sequence. “Even my maths teachers started using my art to explain geometry,” he laughs. “They said, ‘Akhil, your spirals are more fun than our textbooks.’”
Akhil doesn’t see a divide between art and science. “They’re both about seeing patterns,” he says. A recent visit to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where visitors could touch textured walls and smell the flowers depicted in the paintings, has inspired his next idea—making art sensory. “I want people to feel my art, not just look at it. Maybe use fabrics, embossing, or even sound!”
Despite the praise, he stays grounded. “Appa keeps telling me to do what I enjoy and have the courage to be myself. That’s the one mantra I follow.” He pauses, flipping to the last page of his sketchbook where an unfinished figure of a lion rests inside a labyrinth. “Sometimes, I don’t know where I’m going with a drawing,” he admits, “but I just keep going. That’s the fun.”