Srishti was born and grew up in Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan, a region of India known for its colorful arts and great warriors. (Srishti’s name, by the way, is the Sanksrit word for all of God’s creation.) Growing up in a middle class family meant a lot of schooling and tutoring, with only a little time left for artistic endeavors. However, at the age of thirteen Srishti realized that she had a knack for drawing and painting and so indulged herself in art as much as she was able. By fifteen, art time ended due to the great workload the Indian high school student must endure in order to prepare for higher education at a university. (With the ambition of becoming a medical doctor that meant a lot of work.) Fortunately, for those of us who love Srishti and her artistic work, Srishti’s design to attend medical school was curve-balled and she instead found herself working as a computer programmer for a small American astrological software company whose technical department had moved to India. Upon learning that she could draw, her employer requested that she spend her time creating drawings and paintings for the business and leave the programming up to the real geeks. You would think this would make her happy – getting paid a programmer’s salary to paint! But it did not, for she had the ambition at the time of developing as a software engineer, not an artist.
During her employment as a computer programmer, she met and married Ernst Wilhelm, who was an astrologer from America assisting in the company for which she was programming (drawing really!). As a new bride coming to the US, it was, needless to say, quite a change for the young Indian girl and life just rushed by for seven years during which, in partnership with her husband, she created an astrological software company and started a family of three children. Upon all three children attending school and her and her husband’s software business achieving a humble degree of success, she has discovered that her favorite thing to do is to paint, for which we are very lucky in that we can look forward to a great deal more of her work in the years to come.
Srishti currently lives with her husband and children in the beautiful city of Yakima, WA, known as the “Fruit bowl of the Nation.”