Apoorva Mittal

Artist Statement

Apoorva Mittal’s practice begins with noticing. She is drawn to ordinary places and fleeting moments that might otherwise pass without being remembered: a neighbourhood garden, a café, an antique shop crowded with objects, or a corner of a city encountered while walking. She paints these places not simply to record what they look like, but to preserve the experience of looking at them—to understand what made her pause.

Her relationship with art began at the age of four, when her mother, also an artist, enrolled her in a summer caricature class. Art continued to enter her life in bursts through workshops and periods of exploration where she studied portraits, watercolour, miniature painting and Tanjore painting. Her practice is largely self-directed today, grounded in years of observation, experimentation and learning.

Since reconnecting with watercolour in 2020, Apoorva’s work has become rooted in intuition, close observation and plein air painting. She often spends time looking before she begins, allowing shapes, rhythms and colours to emerge before refining the details. Loose, searching marks remain alongside more deliberate passages, creating a sense that the scene could shift in an instant.

Increasingly, Apoorva is less interested in individual subjects than in the relationships between them. An antique shop becomes a study of how objects seem to belong to one another. A garden becomes an accumulation of things reaching, overlapping and growing beyond their boundaries. Ultimately, Apoorva hopes her paintings create the feeling of having stumbled upon something worth lingering over—recognizing something familiar, then discovering something unexpected. She invites viewers to slow down, look again, and find beauty in what might otherwise have been overlooked.