Gravity paintings 2022-2024

In Gravity Paintings, I explore the unseen forces that shape our world—forces that stretch, distort, and pull at both the physical and the metaphysical. This series began in 2016, using traditional Indian Mughal miniature watercolor techniques, but rather than preserving their historical elegance, I introduced gravity as a disruptive element. Figures elongate, collapse, and twist under an invisible weight, challenging the balance and harmony typically found in this style of painting.

In these recent works (2022–2024), I expanded the series by incorporating AI into the creative process. Feeding my original paintings into generative AI, I allowed the technology to reinterpret the forms, introducing new distortions and visual surprises. The results carried their own anomalies—multi-limbed figures, extra fingers, and unexpected artifacts—remnants of AI’s primitive learning process. Rather than viewing these imperfections as flaws, I embraced them, treating them as timestamps of a technological moment in history.

The creative process itself became a kind of ping-pong game, bouncing between digital and traditional techniques. It started with hand-painted miniatures, which were then fed into AI to generate new compositions. These digital distortions were then refined and reworked, before being brought back into the physical realm—hand-painted once again by master painter Kausar Iqbal. His brushwork added an organic depth, ensuring that even in their AI-assisted evolution, these paintings remained deeply connected to tradition. This back-and-forth between machine and human, past and future, digital and physical, became an integral part of the series, layering the works with both technological and artisanal imprints.

The Gravity Paintings continue to evolve, but their core remains the same—a meditation on weight, distortion, and the tension between control and surrender. As gravity tugs at these figures, they remind us of the invisible forces—physical, emotional, and societal—that shape our existence. Through this dynamic interplay of old and new, the work exists in a space where past traditions and future technologies collide, pulling and stretching the boundaries of both.