The Humble Serving Tray

The Humble Serving Tray.

Mughal Queen  Serving Tray

My original quest was to make paintings and create images by hand to capture my audience. I still paint and draw but I found another wonderful way to showcase my ideas and designs. I started embellishing the humble tray quite by accident.

The Rickshaw Tray

I never thought of paintings on trays before and spent a great deal of time and effort creating complicated mosaics to embellish trays. It was a vintage tv tray absently thrown in a garage sale that caught my eye.  I am talking about the metal ones you might have seen like the one below.

Here is my rendering of the tv tray that I like to think of more as a butler’s tray, or a folding table in mosaic tile.

The Folding Butler's Tray

have always loved detailed intricate art and painting. As a child I spent hours staring at a book of paintings acquired from the red fort in Delhi containing prints from Akbar’s Hamzaname and many more delightfully detailed Mughal miniatures. Much of my painting derives its source from this inspiration and the same goes for the digital images I create.

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The Karachi Lahore Table Tray

This tray is inspired by a decoration of an old shipping lines company I found on a vintage matchbox. Karachi is a bustling port city and has been for over a century. Goods travel between Karachi and Lahore often via the large painted trucks. People are always commuting between the two cities. Mall Road and Queens Road are the old colonial names that have persisted despite many attempts to rename these bustling thoroughfares in the heart of the cities of Karachi and Lahore.

Cobalt Jardin Tray

Happy truck tray

And there is the unending quest to create the image that will be in essence from Pakistan. This is why I made trays that are fun images of Karachi, Lahore and Pakistan as we know it.

The Rani Tray

The mosaic trays are like an extension of my painting. I keep returning to watercolor as my medium of choice because I think the fragmented, fractured image holds my imagination. I am constantly deconstructing my world and putting it back together, something a mosaic artist will truly understand. There is a lot of historic mosaic which I have deep respect for and want my audience to appreciate. I will reproduce it and even the humble tray deserves its application for it to transcend to something,  that has been painstakingly rendered into an object of unique art.

https://www.thecraftco.com/collections/serving-trays

Shimmer Tray