Untitled

Writer, political activist and painter, Jagdish Swaminathan drew inspiration for his work from folk and tribal art, Pahari miniatures and Indian mythology. Rejecting 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 late 1960s which he called Time and Space. This series, utilizing the iconography of "the bird, the mountain, the tree, the reflection, the shadow" embraces the metaphorical quality of the surrealists while preserving the formal qualities of Indian miniatures. Swaminathan felt his paintings attempted to symbolically rather than literally capture the essence of tribal culture in India. (J. Swaminathan, 'The Cygan, An Auto-bio note,' Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, 1995, p. 11).