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Miniaturist Olivia Fraser's new exhibition showcases meditative pieces, and an interior landscape that unfolds through geometry. The thousand-petalled lotus opens up in concentric precision, mountains resolve into ascending triangles, banana trees rise as vertical cadences.... A conversation with the artist on her pursuit of 'the essence'.

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A meditative calm reverberates through the hall at the British Council in New Delhi, where Olivia Fraser's 'The Journey Within' is on display.

Presented by gallery Nature Morte, the paintings sit in saturated stillness. Viewers slow down almost involuntarily.

Shoulders drop. Breath lengthens. And then, gently, the art begins to speak.

Fraser did not arrive in India seeking silence. When she moved to Delhi in 1989, art for her was about self-expression.

Painting was external-colours squeezed from plastic tubes, canvas as an arena, the world as a subject. She wanted to paint what she saw, and perceived of the city, in its immediacy. The monuments drew her as they did her husband, author William Dalrymple.

Fraser had decided to be a "travel painter". Art, at that point, was measurement and projection.

Then came the encounter that altered the trajectory of her practice. In the galleries of the National Museum in Delhi, she stood before Indian miniature paintings. "The colours, the gem-like quality, the burnished surface, were completely different from anything I had known," she recalls. The paintings did not attempt illusion. They did not model space.

They did not chase perspective.

They glowed.

What struck her most was their two-dimensionality, their unapologetic 'flatness'. "There was no pretending," she says.

"The surface was the surface.

But it held something profound."

The turning point

Fraser chose not to appropriate the style but to submit to its discipline. Years later, she entered a traditional gurukul in Jaipur, and subsequently trained under master painters in Delhi.

The training dismantled her assumptions about art. Pigments were ground from stone.