My Story

Early years –
I was born into a textile family in the business capital city of Mumbai, India. My father, my grandfather and my great grandfather have been in the textile business since 1867. In 1922-1942 my great grand father had a cotton mill and would export yarn to Japan, my grand father in 1968 had a textile-manufacturing unit where fabric was hand painted, screen-printed and dyed. My father and his two brothers had a home textile export house, exporting finished products to the United States until the early 2000. Born into this family, I was always exposed to fabrics and textiles while growing up. Learning how to feel and touch textile was something that came natural to me .My Father had a very peculiar eye when it came to buying for fabric and clothing material. He often times rubbed the fabric to feel the smoothness. The warp-weft, reed-pick, the thickness and the finesse of the fabric were features he was very careful about. Moreover having worked for the international market I was always taught to wear the right colors by my father and that sparked my interest in color, texture and pattern. I was four years old when I had undergone a Leg Surgery because of which I was home schooled for a few months. Due to less mobility, I was introduced to the world of art and that’s my fondest memory of how I started to be associated with art. I use to learn my numbers and Alphabets with colors and paint. And since then I have always responded to the language of color. Colors have had a very integral part in my life.

School and traveling
During my schooling I was studying Visual Arts at Higher Level in the International baccalaureate diploma program. Along with being creatively involved during my school life, travelling has also been very integral. I was travelling since I was four months old. I had almost been to every continent in the world at the age of 14. My global travels have profoundly shaped my ideologies and concepts of life, people and culture. Abstraction in art is something that wasn’t encouraged in school but my global travel and interest in Indian philosophy allowed me to involve with creating abstract non-representational art. Colors and textures always seem to predominantly be present in my work. I went on to seriously thinking about being a painter to live with my passion of colors, textures and abstraction in art.

Years at College and Chicago
From 2013-2017 I was studied painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Being in an interdisciplinary school, I was exposed to using my painting sensibilities into other cross departments. I had often used Yarn, fabric and materials in combination with abstract ideas of painting and drawing during research and seminar classes. I created abstract forms and textured surfaces in my painting classes based on my memory and intuition. My painting method has always been intuitive and meditative. During college I started realizing my interest for materiality. Chicago has a unique landscape of art, architecture and design that is so different in the vibe and makes for a great place to foster creativity. It has an artistic and aesthetic culture of it’s own that resonates in me till date.

Back to Mumbai, India and how it all started
After coming back to Mumbai in 2017, I had my first art show at a renowned and prestigious art gallery , The Jehangir art gallery in November 2017. Post my first exhibition as an artist I was travelling to different international art fairs to understand the international art market., such as Art Basel,  Hong Kong, Art Basel , Basel ,Art Dubai, Design Miami ,Basel, India Art Fair,  Dubai Design Week etc.. This made me realize that the Fine Art market seems to be working for a very niche and segmented market size for an audience that was too small. On the other hand, I was also realizing my true love for color and texture, which always dominated any art I made. My creative instincts were directing me to an art form that would be more utilitarian. I had this sudden urge of making art that could go beyond the pure aesthetics of “art for art sake. “This indeed triggered the idea of letting creativity reach a larger target audience and at an affordable price. The need to switch into a more volume centric market and to cater to a larger market size I decided to change my creative mechanism of creation to cater to a product, which has a more instrumental value, in other words putting my creative forces to benefit a larger purpose of existence and a larger market size. I wanted make creativity utilized in a format that allowed for room of alterations and generation in accordance to demand of the people. I truly believe that you can sell only what the market is in need of and that got me in to a boat where I switched from being a fine artist to becoming a designer who would use those skills to make a larger difference to the world. Considering the set of skills and expertise I had, surface pattern design for fashion textiles was an industry that would satisfy my need as an artist/designer.

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