HONORS: Painting

This thesis investigates how figuration, drawing, and facture operate across two seemingly opposed traditions: Indo-Persian miniature painting and Western modernist/Expressionist painting. As a child I trained under a miniaturist, learning the siyah-qalam (underdrawing) and planar layering that form the armature of miniature practice.

My fast, intuitive working method clashed with its slower, premeditated compositional rigor. Later, in college, I encountered Western modernist and expressionist painting—De Kooning, Pollock, and Rothko—where immediacy, gesture, and facture are not ancillary but constitutive. That discovery revealed a way to extend the miniature process phase I loved—initial form making—into a practice attuned to speed, spontaneity, and subjective presence.

This ongoing project will produce a suite of large-scale paintings that use siyah-qalam drawing and Gadh-rang paint application as an expressive framework while synthesizing it with abstract expressionist scale, color, and facture to animate my artistic process.