To explain my works, I need to go back to my childhood and formative years. I was born in 1958 in Baroda. Material circumstances were not so bright in the familial side. We were living in a chawl and the street was the place where we, both children and elders, found our breathing space. Streets have since played an important role in my life and works. I was good at drawing. I used to paint lot of street scenes. In those works I was not depicting the human lives per se. Instead I painted the confusion and happiness that I found there. I filled my picture surfaces with vertical and horizontal planes.

Then I went to study painting in the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda. Nazreen Mohammedi was my teacher. She was one of those artists who stressed the importance of lines in creative works. Perhaps, she used only lines to express herself. K.G. Subramanyan was the other teacher and as you know he is a great colourist. I could say that in some way his colours influence me. In college also, I continued to paint streets. I could not flesh out the memories of streets.

Once I finished my diploma in painting I came to Delhi. I got a job in Pragati Maidan (the huge space for national and international trade expos) and this space gave me a lot of ideas. It was a place always in flux. Construction and destruction were the hallmarks of the place. Everyday a new structure comes up and after a week it is brought down. Most of the paintings done during these years reflected this aspect of construction and destruction. Forms of industrial waste, urban by-products, etc., became key images. However, my particular state of mind did not allow any concrete figure to linger on for long. Often colours washed them out.

Meanwhile I did a couple of shows in the Sridharani Gallery and Art Inc. Anybody could see there was some chaos in my works. Canvases became the fields of remembrance and erasing. There was action and construction. Also, there was a deliberate attempt to erase. Some of the critics called my works at this stage as De Cooning-esque and Pollock-ian. But I was not consciously referring to the works of either William De Cooning or Jackson Pollock.

For me, each work is a reference material for the next work. In 2004 Sakshi Gallery did my solo show. By this time my works had evolved into a new phase of optimism. My colours became more serene and the constructions started losing their grave urban leftover feeling. The forms became more organic. I would say it was at this stage that I found peace with my own language.

In 2005 again I had a show with the Sakshi Gallery. This was an interesting show for which I worked very hard. If you look at these works closely, you would see the emergence of a new pattern and colour scheme. All those elements that I found unnecessary have been taken out of my pictorial style. There is a sense of deep meditation and music in them. If all those early works were the written notations of a symphony, I would say, the works of 2005 constituted the actual symphony. There is a feeling of levitation in them. They soothe the viewer as they have soothed my working process. However, I feel an urgency to get back to the construction-destruction method of forms in smaller canvases. At times I start daubing a canvas with flat strokes of deep colours. Then I do not know where it would go. May be the colours lead me to create the works.

Though I do not subscribe to the idea of being called an abstract artist, there is no harm in identifying my works as ‘abstract works’. Many of my classmates like Rekha Rodawittiya, Veer Munshi (all of them became well-known painters) took different routes to express their creative energies. Maybe I am the only student from that batch who took to abstraction. I liked the early abstractions of S.H. Raza and most of the larger works of V. Viswanathan. Also, I admire the works of Prabhakar Kolte and Prabhakar Barwe.