About
About
I was born and raised in the North West of England, near Manchester. It's a place I still hold fondly, and it has shaped me, even though I no longer live there.
For a long time I made images for other people, first as a photographer and then as a digital artist creating stock imagery. I enjoyed it, but I wasn't as free creatively as I wanted to be. When I moved to oil paint, I set out to make work that was truly my own.
I had a spontaneous, spiritually transformative experience, and since then I've looked more inwardly than outwardly, to try to understand who I am fundamentally. Over time, my mind started to quieten, and my awareness of an internal stillness and presence grew as I paid more attention to it. I've come to realise that the truth isn't in the dramatic moments at all. It's in the quiet ones, when the thinking settles and something much simpler is left.
This isn't something that belongs only to monks or mystics. I feel it's here in the everyday, in us all, whether we're aware of it or not, and I hope my paintings are a gentle invitation to be with this stillness.
In my Transcendence paintings, a girl in a white dress leans against a worn wall, with wings that aren't about heaven but about the inner beauty in us all. A face rests with its eyes closed. A woman sits quietly as the sky changes behind her. Each figure points to something deeper, beyond the surface noise: the more fundamental internal stillness I became increasingly aware of.
In my newest series, Stillness, I create the highlights by removing paint, which for me represents letting go of attention to thought, until a quiet face and the pale light within it come through. The figure is an archetype rather than a portrait of anyone: someone caught at the moment of stillness, bridging the inner and outer worlds.
I paint on aluminium panels primed with gesso. I prefer their harder surface to canvas, and they're durable, so each painting will last. I also like that a panel can be hung without a frame, so there's no border or barrier between the painting and the viewer. 10% of every sale, before VAT, goes to YoungMinds. I know through experience that young people now have a harder start than I did, and I would like to help make that a little bit easier for them.
— Pali Rao
How I see
With extreme short sight and monovision, one of my eyes sees a blur and the other is sharp only at a set distance. The soft edges and sharp focus in my paintings aren't a style I borrowed. They're how I see.
Before painting
I became a professional photographer in 2004, and from 2006 my digital imagery was licensed through Getty Images/iStock. Amongst other places, my images appeared on London Underground trains and in a space-themed Epcot installation. They earned seven International Photography Awards honourable mentions, and were selected for Lürzer's Archive's 200 Best Digital Artists Worldwide 2019/20. In 2025 I turned to oil painting.
Exhibitions
- 2026 · In The Hands of Angels, Arbory Trust, Barton, Cambridge (6–8 Nov), in aid of Arthur Rank Hospice · Among Us