A Love

Despite Gollapudi’s aim to impact everyone from the opportunity-starved to the underrepresented, a more personal motive keeps her behind the easel for hours each week: love.

Because to Gollapudi, a work of art is not a day of work.

As those linear marks of graphite slowly cease to appear on kitchen walls, a tradition lost as children become adults, Gollapudi’s lines of growth—her flecks of paint, her dashes of pen ink, her strokes of vibrant oil that take hours to form a single piece — show no signs of plateauing as life’s other obligations increase.

At the end of a long school day, art is the mode of relaxation, of self-care, that Gollapudi relies on to “keep that work-life balance.”

Just as balance is a principle of the arts, art will always remain a principle in Gollapudi’s life.

“I’ve dedicated so much of my life to [art],” Gollapudi said. “I can’t possibly imagine one where I don’t paint for a couple hours every week.”

Her ever-evolving art portfolio of lines, from sculpture sketches to pencil etches, will forever be what makes Isha, Isha.

To know her is to know the sketches that line the margins of her chemistry homework.

The Post-Its adorned with intricately-drawn flowers that she distributes to bored classmates during a lesson.

The hours she spends each week on her passion.

The passion she discovered with a paintbrush held in her tiny fist at four years old and continues to explore with every piece, every figurative tick-mark on the wall.