VANARAA VI

Among the influences on Natvar Bhavsar’s evolving abstractionist practise in the U.S., where he went to study in the early 1960s, the most significant was that of Piero Dorazio, his Italian professor of painting at the University of Pennsylvania. Dorazio’s paintings mostly consisted of bands of colour in stripes or grids, and the thick red band in Bhavsar’s VANARAA VI seems to have been plucked out of his professor’s paintings. Bhavsar’s red band, however, has a spiritual quotient as it fades into the universe beyond as it travels upwards. The blue atmosphere of which it is a part too vaporises gradually.