AMBEE

Welcomed warmly in New York when he made it his home in the 1960s, Natvar Bhavsar maintained a conscious engagement with India through the titles of his works. His paintings are a celebration of India as much as an ode to the freedom America offered him. AMBEE—the word denotes a raw mango, the motif of the paisley famously drawn from it—here is a purple swirl with streaks of orange and yellow shooting out of it as a reminder of his growing up years in Saurashtra surrounded by vats of colour used for dyeing textiles.