In my works, I have tried to structure a field of colours and  a span of time. An isolated non-specific happening, born in my mind, is left to the viewer to set the happening in time and place. In the alchemy of man’s mind, all attributes like hope, courage, faith and love can be transmuted to ruthlessness, as recent events bear witness. In an oblique way, my works are message bearing without any zeal to proselytise. These are some of the paintings executed during the last 15 years with an aim to create an immediate quality of ‘real’ experience. Most canvases are allegories of life -  a play of forms in imagined spaces.

 

  Often as I gaze into the sun, the blue of the sky, or with eyes closed, delve into the recess of time, I try to catch the emerging images from the damaged life forces around me. I grew up when socialism was the ‘mantra’ – yesterday’s method of dealing with inadequate wealth. Now socialism is obsolete and crass consumerism is in. My works are a kind of inquiry of this human equation, a mode of stating an intuition concerning our life. In one canvas, a ‘Gandharva’ plays a tanpura (an indian stringed musical instrument), the banyan tree a visible force of nature listens. With mythical overtones, it draws attention to the time honoured custom of worshipping trees, which today is reduced to a ritual. In other works, there are hints of disturbed air, the need to inhale, exhale the right way.

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The works on paper take on various functions – within the damp throbbing marshy land and water. Sometimes it is just varied rhythms within the encompassed space. At times, there is a kind of documentation of the day to day life of the underpriviliged. I speak through colours the circumstances of their lives. Familiar to the eye, they are meant to stir the imagination. Colours jerk or glide, interrupt themselves or weave into skeins arriving at a point where only my mind and hand know each other.