After having worked for 28 years in an abstract expressionist manner, in November 2011, I stumbled into a new series of paintings based on the rock formations of the Colorado Plateau.

The vast and rugged rock formations that stretch over 130,000 square miles over five western states had struck awe in me from the first moment that I drove across them in the late-eighties when, as a family, we took a road trip across the high desert towards Oregon.  Upon returning, I regurgitated three or four urgently felt though rudimentary landscapes in a single afternoon.  All recorded my moving through that vast stillness.

I grew up in a city in southern India, on a volcanic plateau more ancient than the one upon which I now live my adult life. Compared to the precarious granite boulders of the Deccan Plateau that are the unrelenting grey of an elephant’s hide, the Colorado Plateau is characterized by dramatic scale and flagrant color. Yet in this new land, among the hills, the arroyos, the crumbling fractured rock, the semi-arid desert so reminiscent of my childhood, I felt the sharp tug on my DNA as similar to the call of home.  As precarious as moving to a different continent can be, rocks are the super symbols of stability and permanence, yet they are vulnerable to the effects of the elements and the consequent erosion.

Since that first of many trips, I have become familiar with the artistic giants of the region – O’keefe, Dixon, Blumenschein, Higgins and Marin, much later of the Group of Seven and of Regionalism.  They hold a high bar.  Still, I cannot help but draw from the same well as they did before me – these mountains and plains, canyons and stretches of sky, pinion, sage and cottonwoods. Mostly they were in the form of small plein air works in pastel, charcoal or water color, or drawings from memory or photographs that were more reductive and expressionistic.  But in the spring and summer of 2011, after many years of hiatus, I dug up some old photographs and began to revisit landscape in a sporadic but more exploratory fashion.

It was later that year, having cleared my studio of work for a show in New Delhi that I gave myself six weeks, to see what would emerge.  I prepared ten or fifteen panels and small canvases (I had some precious linen canvas from the studio of the late Dale Chisman after all that I needed to try out), so if I gained momentum I would not need to stop.  From mixed media, collage and acrylic I changed to oil.

Among my ‘artifacts’ from in and around Ghost Ranch in Abiquiui I found a skeletal sketch of rock and hill formations.  It was an innocuous starting point.  But with each little canvas, it dawned on me that I was not just making a more cohesive body of what I had previously done, but that sparks of previously unimagined impulses were emerging.  Each new painting revealed additional layers to explore.  After several small paintings, things began to click into place, and by the end of the allotted six weeks, cohesive threads and building blocks became apparent.  There was no question in my mind that I would return from my show in India eager to commit the future to the possibilities.

In my studio at Space, I went up from 12”x16” canvases to 60”x120” inches.  Preaently in my home studio amongst the rocks in Ken Caryl, I focus my work on the area just behind the Front Range where giant red rocks angle out from the low green mountains – Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater, Morrison, Ken Caryl, Arrowhead and Garden of the Gods.  After working on a culminating painting of the Red Rocks Amphitheater, I spent the summer making small drawings; early this year, “Winter Rocks”.  My purpose remains to convert the present stillness of these vast lands into dynamic and lyrical movement while trying to retain their latent power and poetic mystery.

Statement for the “Ellipse” series:

Life cycles have a way of re-occurring.  Only, they never return in perfect circles, but in wobbly, misshapen ellipses, unexpectedly, unpredictably, and yet with a certain rhythm.  The shape has always been present in my work from the earliest tentative explorations into abstract shapes.

Monotypes are everything that is direct, spontaneous, unexamined, unbidden, and confident, gushing on their own, in that moment when creating is merely a channel for something beyond the conscious.   The collage is everything the monotype is not: thoughtful, considered and meandering; it is what seeps quietly beneath the surface, conscious and aware.  But above all, it is the thinnest of skins – fragile, absorbent and tenacious.

For this new body of work that I have come to think of the ellipse series, I worked back into the monotypes.  In a careful, deliberative process, I laid down thin skins of tissue, of paper, of cloth, making marks, erasing, red-defining, re-aligning, sometimes with charcoal and paint, sometimes thick, sometimes, thin; transparent and opaque.  The more I concealed, the more what was revealed became mysterious and charged.  To heighten the contemplative quality of these collages, I superimposed a neutral palette on the vivid inks and active surface of the underlying monotype.

Statement 2009:

(last modified in 2013 but pertaining to the origin of imagery in my earliest work, the Mantra series)

Despite my training in representational images, I had to leave the familiar territory of the figure, the still life, the landscape when I began to search for visual equivalents of certain intriguingly abstract ideas of Indian philosophy in the concept of “Brahman”, which is the idea of a sort of universal matrix that defies both description and limitation.
the understanding of which can be only arrived at by removing everything else.  An idea of an entity from which everything emanates, to which everything returns, but which is not limited to any of the things that come from it.

Just as the layers must be peeled away to reveal the truth, I too had to shed what I had learnt and start from the beginning.  I built images from their simplest forms and came up with an ellipse that contained weight and yet floated, on a background that was of ambiguous depth seemed to have a watery presence, in shapes that were either vertical (to suggest a sense of rising), but more often squarish forms that did not push or pull in any one direction so that the container did not impose itself and its boundaries on the contained.

I turned my attention to the ancient sound of chants, and began to incorporate automatic writing, specifically in the Devnagari script (Sanskrit), the language of the chants.  Other visual elements came into the work – I added torn paper, textiles and filled out the layered forms which in turn became more icon-like.

Today my primary interest lies in the formal language of visual expression as it is carried forward by the thrust or incisiveness of line, by the thickness of texture, by the resonance of color, by the acrobatic precision of balance, by the still ambiguities of negative space, the contrasts between transparency and opacity, and by the juiciness or spareness of ink, much like a symphonic piece of music exists in its own linguistic context without the need of words.

It’s within the layered and nuanced relationships between elements such as these, that I look each time for the elusive presence of beauty.

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