Title: "Exuberance"
Date: 1997
Dimensions: 5 feet X 6feet.
Collection of Carolyn Haynie, New York.

Artist/educator Chitra Ramanathan's current series of predominantly large-scale mixed media paintings portray the mental emotion of happiness as a visual entity through color and textures. They are inspired by short-lived garden blooms and constantly changing seasons in nature, characteristics that attribute to the ephemeral, fleeting and enticingly beautiful happiness' "formless form": a phrase she has coined to describe her concept. The hint of circles almost always present in her works signify the cycle of human life: trying times followed by happy phases in a positive sense, and of life and rebirth influenced by her roots from India.