Naqsh III(2026)
WATERPROOF INK ON FINE GRAIN PAPER
Naqsh presents the same face three times: once in deep saturated colour, once luminous with gold, once reduced entirely to line. The technique throughout is crosshatch, each work built mark by mark in waterproof ink, forward only, nothing erasable. The discipline of the method is visible in the surface. Each work is set within a border of Indian brocade silk, handpicked by the artist from her own textile archive. The brocade is not decorative framing. Neither the painting nor the cloth is complete without the other. What is presented here is a single object that is both. Naqsh is an Urdu word for mark, motif, impression: the trace a surface holds after the hand has left it. It names the crosshatch line and the woven pattern with equal precision. It also names what this series is about: not the face itself, but what the face leaves behind.
Portraits XIII (2025)
ACRYLICS ON CANVAS
To long for something is to already half-possess it. These are portraits of that half. Each work in this series is named for a word that has no clean translation — Surur, Farhat, Sukun, Mahboob, Premi — because longing never does. Rooted in Urdu and Punjabi, these names were chosen not as titles but as invocations, each one summoning a feeling the heart knows before the mind can name it. I have always been drawn to faces that hold something back. This series began as a study in restraint, what a portrait reveals when it refuses to explain itself, what remains when everything unnecessary is stripped away. The subjects do not perform. They simply exist, in the way that memory exists: vivid, incomplete, and entirely present. Thirteen portraits. Thirteen words for a feeling that resists translation. Painted on canvas in the tradition of intimate portraiture, this series marks the close of a sustained inquiry into desire, memory, and the faces we carry with us long after we have let go.
The series is now complete. A small number of original works remain available
XIII/XIII
Sonya
