Mountain, Tree and Bird Series

Swaminathan was interested in the bearing indigenous concepts, tribal, folk and tantric had on modern Indian painting. He argued, that in opposition to the Western approach, traditional Indian paintings were never meant to represent reality in the naturalistic objective sense. Rather, they were cogent and poetic renderings of truth in a two-dimensional space.

His own interest in 'numenous' possibilities in Indian painting resulted in the Mountain, Tree and Bird Series. Here, the artist creates a conceptual landscape using forms borrowed from nature. His compositions are ordered by flat bright color fields, on which appear simplified mountains, trees and birds.