Monsters in full bloom

Gopa Trivedi's miniature-style works are at once beautiful and unsettling, with haunting creatures that are just as delicate as her flowers

- JUHIKADEVI BHANJDEO

Miniature paintings flourished under the Mughal Empire (from the 16th to the 18th century). But the style is almost impossible to find now. Art schools don't teach it. Even experts run only short-term workshops. So, it's unusual for a contemporary artist to seek out the style and fuse it with manuscript painting, fusing handwritten text with miniature-style illustration.

Gopa Trivedi is that artist. Her work spans subjects as diverse as anthropomorphic monsters and animal husbandry. The style seems influenced by the Company School, in which Indian manuscript painters engaged with European botanical studies and rendered their own works in delicate watercolour. Trivedi uses fine squirrel-hair brushes and intricate pardakht (dot-work) to bring complex worlds to life on paper. In the unusual style, she says she's "found the kind of intimacy I wanted a viewer to have with my work and the sensibility I wanted to convey".