Press

My practice emerges from a sustained engagement with the contemporary Indian landscape — rural edges, river systems, agricultural territories, and rapidly transforming peri-urban zones — as sites where the promises of development meet the limits of ecology. Over the past nineteen years, I have returned to these landscapes not to romanticize them, but to observe how they are reshaped by extraction, infrastructure, and accelerated growth. In my work, climate change is not a single event or a distant catastrophe; it is the visible outcome of a deeper rupture in relationship — between humans and the living world, between short-term ambition and long-term ecological time.

This ethical and ecological concern is inseparable from my approach to painting. My technique is shaped by a dialogue between Indian miniature painting and Western painting, and by the layered histories of cultural exchange in India itself. Miniature traditions offer a powerful model of visual narration: they are built around storytelling, and they carry an intensity of detail — especially in the figures and elements within the scene — that invites close reading. I work to translate that spirit into a contemporary language, using painting to weave a story around the concept or issue that becomes the work’s central subject.

Formally, I work with oil on canvas and mixed media, building surfaces through layering, abrasion, and accumulation. The dense, patient construction of the image becomes a counter-rhythm to the speed of erasure produced by extraction and rapid transformation. I use brushwork openly, and I do not pursue academic perspective or academic lighting as a goal. Instead of a seamless illusion, I aim for an image that feels lived-in — where time, pressure, and contradiction remain visible.

Rather than illustrating a single scene, I create visual fields in which different registers can coexist: beauty and damage, growth and depletion, intimacy and distance. The work asks the viewer to slow down and to sense landscape not as a backdrop, but as a living network of relations. I am interested in what disappears when speed becomes a value: the slow intelligence of water, the resilience of soil, the memory held in local ecosystems, and the shared vulnerability that binds human and non-human life. The logic of unchecked development often externalizes its consequences, moving harm away from centers of power and onto those least protected — other species, future generations, and communities whose livelihoods are tied to land and water. My paintings resist clean narratives of “progress” by insisting that change is never neutral, and that loss leaves a trace.

While the Indian landscape is my grounding, the questions the work carries are not bound to one geography. The ecological crisis is also a crisis of imagination: a persistent belief that humans stand apart from nature, rather than within it. Painting becomes, for me, a way to challenge that separation. Each work is an act of attention that refuses to look away from what is being lost, and insists — through narrative detail, material presence, and slow looking — on radical interconnectedness.