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Painted Forward
Classical inspiration. Contemporary imagination.
Painted Forward explores how the visual language of Raja Ravi Varma’s(1848-1906) paintings can inspire contemporary objects and digital experiences.
The project began with a question: how can historical artistic inspiration become more than an image placed on a product? Working from selected painting references, I developed a custom style in Recraft and explored their colour, light, drapery, ornament, and narrative detail as starting points for design.
Motion became another way to explore the references without overwhelming them. A flickering lamp, gently moving jasmine, and subtle reflections bring still images to life. The Monsoon Window places this movement inside a contemporary interior, while After the First Rain and Jasmine at Midnight connect physical album packaging with animated digital covers.
The result is not a reconstruction of historical objects or a set of direct reproductions. It is a contemporary exploration of how artistic references can shape form, surface, atmosphere, and storytelling—connecting a historical visual language with new possibilities for everyday life.
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Kalighat 2026: The Machines Are the New Babus
Kalighat paintings were cheap bazaar watercolours sold in 1880s Calcutta, and they were satire: they mocked the city's new rich, dandies who aped their British masters and lounged while servants fanned them.
I trained a Recraft V4 Style on five anonymous Kalighat sheets from the Cleveland Museum of Art and Wellcome Collection, keeping the bold single outline, flat colour and empty paper ground.
Then I turned the satire on 2026: the machines are the new babus. Phones smoke hookahs on velvet chairs, robot vacuums ride in palanquins, and humans fan, carry and groom their devices. Same masters, new hardware.
Social post: https://lnkd.in/p/gXJn_FQQ
MIMESIS
What happens when fashion becomes part of a painting?
Inspired by 17th-century Dutch paintings from the Getty collection, I created a custom style in Recraft to explore the relationship between fashion, art, and visual perception.
From patterned floors to velvet curtains and spotted horses, each look blends into its surroundings, blurring the line between clothing and the world around it.
Created for the Contra × Recraft Archive Style Challenge.
Vif-Argent — Prima Materia
An invented fashion house, cast from a 1614 silver ewer and George Barbier's fashion plates.
In 1614 Adam van Vianen hammered a single sheet of silver into an ewer so fluid that the Rijksmuseum writes, "On this ewer everything is in motion," and suggests it shows prima materia, the alchemists' first matter.
I paired it with George Barbier's fashion plates and read their palette as the four colours of the alchemical Great Work: black, white, yellow, red.
Vif-Argent ("quicksilver") is an invented 2026 maison whose first collection is one transmutation in six plates, and at every stage the silver stops being jewellery and becomes the dress.
It ends in Coniunctio, the chemical wedding: she takes the hand of her own silver statue, and the two wear the same gown.
Every image was made in Recraft with chained V4 Styles: the archive first, then each stage's best plates fed back in to keep her face and the silver.
The six plates
I. Opus — the raw matter, crowned with van Vianen's silver
II. Nigredo — a ribbon burns to niello black
III. Albedo — satin turns to quicksilver
IV. Citrinitas — a pleated fan gilds into orpiment gold
V. Rubedo — the silver, molten, worn on the body
VI. Coniunctio — she joins her own silver statue
Full studio board, every iteration → https://www.recraft.ai/project/14f20321-6799-416e-b045-7931082a7ff8
