 Very large and important work for me again a family painting the Sherkill family from my mother's side Painted it over two years Took a lot out of me in some way the scale produced a certain Formality a certain kind of distance science of fire a forest fire the whole inside a blaze Overlapped as an image mixed media and collage The planes of Punjab burning a series of charcoal drawings started off on a visit to Auschwitz The quality of the landscape a kind of subterranean a very dark and very bleak journey taking place Many of the images quite abstract didn't have any sense of location Could feel images about war War in some sense the second world war images of nuclear holocaust of violence has scorched our own situation and once that is over The paintings again form part of the desire to return to a very direct human Sensuous palpable experience It's such a large You've had a long history of friendship of doing in the sense of exhibitions together But not actually working together I thought that working on a canvas We all won't be able to participate the way we did in glass painting So we thought we'll be able to forget our egos and work together Baroda is a small town Compared to Bombay. I've been working in Baroda since last 28 years. I think Temples, mosques, churches are very much part of our living They form essential part of my painting These gods and goddesses are almost next door neighbors or someone who stays upstairs Naturalistic painting has not interested me My interest is mostly in the narrative painting the time sequence in painting interest me in 1971 I started doing paintings based on professions. I Used the colors that were used by middle-class people Particularly shocking pink green and blue. I'm happy with these paintings Though I did not sell these paintings for a long time. I Used the things around us. I used colors of posters garish and vulgar At present I'm interested in play of light in my painting The way light falls on objects The way things get eliminated. I've been collecting this oligarch since 1962 right in the beginning the things which I had collected are from the cinema posters The gods and goddesses posters and also very late miniatures All these things had interested me These things have been ignored because they were considered as things which are on periphery of art the earlier work Like a tailor watch repairer is a satire on the existing work being done Certain things which I thought I had no courage to say. I needed some courage to say So I'd use totally different way of approaching the problem Slowly I could gather the courage and say these things things Which interested me started coming? the problems of Transvestite problems of homosexuality problems of so many things which I was not able to depict on the canvas Slowly I could do it in the later work Although I do paint things about people who are on this street I don't go down onto the street and sketch What I like to do is observe as much as I can or at least Incorporate in my mental space much that I see around me and I have been seeing around me for the 12 years that I have worked in this studio and Then come back to my studio and recall all that I have observed And this is how I actually work. I mean I like the stress of recall I like the stress of you know the strain of recalling from memory pulling it through various Screens almost and then bringing forth a figure. I had started working on the watercolors in 1983 and the idea started Because I had to vacate my studio Which was under repair and had a very small space to work in at my home and It was really starting in a very small way in a very small format So it was at this point that I started to do the watercolors After having done a whole series I showed them to a friend in Ima shake and she introduced me to the works of an artist the Turkish artist called see a column I wish she felt it was important for me to see at that point and I think that was really something fantastic See a column is a series of pictures done by Turkish nomadic artists of the 15th century Wandering in the deserts and recording the nomadic lives of the tribes of that area and With a poverty of means It's simply washes of CPR and Bansi and Persian blue even little flecks of gold at times I guess when they had little money, they could just put a little bit of golden With just this they were able to record the most marvelous things You know dervishes and fakirs and then I think that was for me a revelation series about Conversations with artists of the past who have played a vital role in my art perceptions The works entitled rethinking Raja Ravi Varma and Marsha and the other Vermeer women are from this series the picture entitled of monsters and angels a Fable is about reinventing figures from the miniature painting traditions and placing them in post-colonial times Signified by the appearance of the Occidental Angel another set of pictures manifest the city my city Bombay The areas and locales that I encounter every day Beneath the mundane skin lies an alternate world Which reveals itself only when it's not being looked at That is when it is absorbed in itself and does not rise to meet your gaze I Am curious about the possibility of painting states of one's mind. I Do not wish to be mystical at all by states of mind I'm referring to emotions that grip on an ordinary context of one's life Like oppression anxiety self-absorption anger when I paint this figure I put in the posture all at once with a loaded brush like a mark and That mark has in it the charm of the stoop the gesture the facial expression all of it incorporate in that very instant I do pictures of the human face out of a passionate obsession These are faces of people I have been meeting for many years. I Walk down my street where my studio is situated in Lohar Chal It is the party while I'm waiting in the rain for a quick assignment For the boys who run errands for the ODP restaurant Or the old widow who I meet going up and down the stairs Who lives in her memories of being an actress at one time? I do not know whether this is truth or fantasy I'm obsessed with getting into these people that have secret lives that I will never know a series of pastels called journeys Very joyous works The whole thing about journeys see journeys leaving one shores exploring other people's other cultures a lot of them 19th century fantasy travels a range of possibilities that excites me These journeys started off as abstract works, but the latter ones Concretized having a certain geography is a place a reference to a certain time Going to the opposite of starting with abstraction and then making a kind of story or a narrative I'd like to go out fantasy journeys And then come back home and then leave again Many of the paintings that I do I think about for sometimes for years I get get an image in my head and that image I ruminate about I make sketches and it might be Two or three years later that actually come about to do that painting because many changes take place But the painting at the moment is a constructed Artifact it is something that I put together from this kind of long History that I have of this image or images that make the painting The landscape in Kasoli has become a very central feature of my work By landscape I also include the human beings and in fact over the last 20 years since I've been coming here many Local people that I have established a very close personal contact have become a very important feature of my work The way that the colors come in the way the quality of the light the kinds of textures that are there Where the landscape then becomes a grand metaphor? 1980 did a portrait of my father a Turning point in my work that being Considerable crisis the crisis about bringing the human figure in From that point a series of paintings evolved Set the pattern which still exists today In the oil paintings that I'm doing The desire to have as large a spectrum in terms of my subject matter Where I do allow the personal characters Friends of mine to be subject matter of painting which has been the modernist movement Anatma you don't paint your friends or your beloved or your family members