Hathairat Maneerat is a Bangkok, Thailand born, New York City based, self-taught artist. Hathairat
started her career as a women’s wear fashion designer, establishing her namesake brand,
HATHAIRAT in 2014. Through her conceptual clothing designs, she became more interested in
painting as way to be completely free and express her endless imagination and creativity.
Hathairat’s artworks exhibit her love of bold, bright colors to create an eccentric mood and feeling for
each painting. The mix of fine lines that transition into a smooth blending of bold and contrasting
colors exemplify her work. Her work often contains unexpected geometric shapes of key focus
subjects which she credits to letting her imagination flow for new ideas during the painting process
often leading to ‘outside of the box’ results.
“As a former fashion designer I naturally developed the shape of the form such as curves,
draping and soft lines into my sketch. My inspiration is usually spurred from one object that I
like and it bursts into one single painting with unexpected shapes and forms blending into
one painting. This is when I allow myself to create freely.”
Each of her works of art develops organically as each piece of art begins with a high level concept
and develops with each new level of detail. The excitement for her comes every time she looks at
each piece with fresh eyes. She enjoys the unexpected progress as it provides her with a more free
state of mind. Given her background in fashion design, where she worked intensively with models,
fitting and sizing each garment, the beauty of the figure blending with an eccentric dream sense
came naturally to her. Today, through her life and travels, anything has the potential to inspire her
next painting.
“I paint wherever and whenever my mind takes me. What I enjoy the most is that people
always see the different stories from my artwork. They have their own stories to tell or what
they think when they see my art pieces. I don’t usually have a story behind the whole
painting as I often start my creative process based on one object and then start adding lines
and shapes as the art piece progresses into many objects that start to coordinate and
complement each others’ meaning and the painting begins to tell its own story”