Lately, I’ve found myself deeply inspired by the Baroque masters—particularly Rembrandt and Vermeer—and their remarkable ability to conjure so much life on such intimate scales. There’s something undeniably powerful about the way they captured light, atmosphere, and emotion within small canvases. These portraits, painted at the height of realism before the invention of photography, reflect a kind of observation that feels pure, deliberate, and deeply human. I often wonder what it meant to see in a time before photography altered our visual vocabulary forever.
We can’t go back to that moment in history. The photographic image has not only changed how we see—it has changed what we expect to see. We are now steeped in a constant flood of imagery, and the way we process the world is inherently filtered through a photographic sensibility. And yet, I find something resonant in those early Baroque portraits. They feel like precursors to the photograph: intimate, glowing, and reverent toward light. Their scale—often comparable to modern photo prints—makes that comparison even more compelling.
This connection between old and new informs much of my current work. I find myself looking closely at found images, especially low-resolution, stock, and news images. These are photos of people I don’t know, often from places I’ve never been. And yet, there’s an implicit demand for connection—particularly when these images come from stories in the news, or when they represent places like India, where my ancestry and cultural heritage originate. There’s a subtle expectation that I should feel something when I see these faces. That expectation, whether externally imposed or internally felt, becomes a thread I pull at in my practice.
In examining these images, I notice the visual tropes that emerge. Zoomed in and pixelated, these faces begin to unravel—edges blur, color blocks appear, and yet, light remains the constant. There’s something poetic in that breakdown. It mimics the act of observation itself, which is never clean or whole. I spend time getting very close to these images, the way a painter might study a model or a mirror. It’s not unlike what Rembrandt did, but instead of looking at a physical subject, I’m looking at a digital ghost—a stranger mediated by compression and code.
What fascinates me most is how these contemporary images still echo art historical forms. Even within degraded pixels, I see classical lighting schemes, familiar poses, the soft geometry of a face rendered in shadow. These resonances remind me that visual culture is a continuum. The language of light and form persists, even when filtered through mass media, stock photography, or internet ephemera.
By engaging with these tropes—particularly those found in stock imagery rather than just news—I begin to understand how our collective subconscious is shaped. These types of images aren’t just documents; they’re carriers of cultural code. In this sense, they become ripe for interruption—for reinvestment with attention, observation, and care.
So I find myself drawing lines between Rembrandt’s gaze and my own. His was a gaze grounded in physical proximity, in personal presence. Mine is filtered through the anonymity of the screen. But both are acts of looking, of searching for meaning in a face. And it’s in that search—in the light, the shadow, the broken resolution—that I find the thread. It connects centuries, cultures, and conditions of seeing. That thread is the tapestry I’m trying to unravel and reweave through my work.
Rembrandt self-portrait, 1628, oil on panel, ~10 x 8 inches
Priya N. Green, White Noise 1, 2024, oil on canvas, 14 x 11 inches