A journey through the art of Shivani Dugar involves a journey into the soul and essence of nature celebrating the abundant beauty of nature and the five elements – air, earth, wind, fire and space. She absorbs and is absorbed by the natural world, taking it’s sights and sounds, it’s colors and it’s textures and reflecting them into meditations on nature, in all it’s awesome `sublime’ power and it’s delicacy of pattern and texture. Her work operates on two planes of exploration: firstly, the concept of a spiritual quest into Nature, and, secondly, an occupation with the purely formal questions of the medium, addressing the interplay of line, color, form, and brushstroke to give structure and dynamism to this quest.

For Shivani, art begins with an emotion, an emotion created by Nature. The emotion creates a gesture, which in turn creates a line, a line which then divides and creates a space and tension. This is the germination of all her work. Her study of the making of this `mark’ led her to explore intricate layering and positioning of marks, which in turn, create dynamic movement and texture. This technique of mark making, perfected in her prints, is the basis of her work as she moved into the area of oil painting.

The paintings are full of color but yet not `colorful’. With an almost puritanical restraint she limits her palette to a minimum of colors, instead choosing to explore the many tones of each color chosen, often creating monochromatic works that gradually reveal their myriad tonalities. She shies away from an overt, glossy exuberance, preferring the beauty of a soft, matt landscape of oil. The delicate balance of colors creates it’s own tension as the colors vibrate against each other.