About

I’m Niya, 26, painter by trade, observer by habit.

I grew up inside my parents’ interior-design studio, mixing paint for sample boards and shifting furniture twice my size. The walls were the only thing that never moved; everything else was fair game. An unplanned apprenticeship in how colour and form change the way people feel in a room. Design school in Bangalore (Srishti) sharpened my craft; a postgraduate year at London’s Royal College of Art taught me to ask why before how.

Took me a bit to get there but, I realised I care most when art does a job. When it leaves the frame and says something useful.

That is what led me to For The Record, and it is the centre of my practice today. The works often begin with things that are easy to overlook but hold deep importance within my client’s journey: a material detail, a useful object, a turning point. I’m interested in documenting that quiet infrastructure behind a life or a body of work, by giving it some colour, and form.

My background in interiors and art direction still shapes the way I think, but For The Record is where those threads come together. It is the clearest expression of what I want my work to do.

Off the clock, my other studio is the kitchen where I test-drive recipes until they’re restaurant-ready, always with this mix of indie grooves in the background. Listen to it here