Delicate, ephemeral, soft, fresh, gentle, fragrant, momentary, fleeting.

Replace breath with flower and you can use the same adjectives. My connection to flowers goes back to when I first started painting. I did not paint sunsets or mountains or people. I painted flowers. Beautiful, colourful and gorgeous flowers!

The choice of Indigo was because I rarely come across a flower of this colour in northern India. Indigo is intertwined in the history of my country since the discovery of the dye during the Harrapan age. It has shaped not just fashion but trade, economics and politics around the world. There is more to indigo than just a shade of blue, it is an apt colour to show the layered nuances.

I wanted to explore the beauty of flowers beyond the fantastic colours, to see their structure, to delve into the soul. I wanted my work to go beyond the obvious and reveal the deeper truth and hence the X-Ray like quality which reveals what lies inside.

They remind me of people around me, dressed up in bright clothes, accessorized to suit an occasion. But underneath the socially acceptable visage they are pure and vulnerable.

If only we all possessed the X-Ray vision to see the delicacy of nature and fragility of humans.