It’s about feeling. I want to create an enclosure for intimacy. They are fruits and palms in the tropical set-ups. However, I am not painting melons or mangoes. I am painting my“feeling” about melons and mangoes. I am not composing “roomscapes”. I am using juxtaposition of forms and colours to bring about that mood in an enclosed space. Having delicate and beautiful things so close, we tend to overlook it. I want to rearrange it. Making it more visible and so that we can stop and look around us. And I always want it to be like a folk song, whether it’s joy or sorrow, definitely beautiful. I imagine the light and express it.

The child that sometimes appear in the paintings are to represent the sufferings of the children in war-torn countries. They are my children and they your children. I am not making a report on war-crimes. I am not justifying any. I am trying to paint how a child has suffered and yet he seeks freedom and peace.

I imagine happiness and express it. I want the play of shapes to dance in the viewer’s eyes. And when it does I want to capture it. It’s like a piece of music frozen in time. People always ask what does it mean? I say don’t concern yourself with the meaning. The key to appreciate modern contemporary art is to put meaning aside. See how the paintings affect you. Does it play in your eyes or does it go deeper? It’s about the “mood”. People listening to Tchaikovsky never ask what the meaning is. People listening to Bob Marley never ask why he shook the world from that small Caribbean Island. They just felt it. Meaning will come when your eyes cannot leave the paintings and the paintings are beginning to shout at you.