Untitled

Writer, political activist and painter, Jagdish Swaminathan, drew inspiration for his work from folk and tribal art, Pahari miniatures and Indian mythology. Rejecting the conventions of Western naturalism, for an art which struggled to "probe the relation of color to space," Swaminathan began work on a series of paintings during the 1970s which he called Time and Space. This series, utilizing the iconography of the bird, the mountain, the tree, the reflection and the shadow, embraces the metaphorical quality of the surrealists while preserving the formal qualities of Indian miniatures. (J. Swaminathan, 'The Cygan, An Auto-bio note,' Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, 1995, p. 11).