My earliest forays into visually expressing myself were through the medium of collage as a response to the metaphoric poetry of the mystical poet Nelly Sachs. Before I had encountered her poetry I had never really attempted seriously expressing myself visually. But of course I had already written a lot of poetry, published and read my work all over the country and had published my first volume of poems. There was a lot of passion and anger and intensity and eagerness and zeal and desperation in me and my work. It was like being in a whirlpool of chocolate, spittle, blood...beneath a haze of mist that smelled of longing. I was in my 20s then. Nelly Sachs' poetry inspired me out of the whirlpool and taught me to fly...and in that flight transform myself and not be afraid of transcending the temporal...be tangible and yet intangible.

Her poetry forced me to feel soul-deep and respond to rhythms that I had not thought I would even be able to comprehend. The only way I could respond was through a form that expressed itself intuitively. The collages happened. I am happy for that because after that all the art that grew from me happened intuitively. Through this creative medium I am able to go into those realms that I cannot explore with the other mediums I use (words). The line explores the depths of spaces, the limits and beyond the limits of my consciousness, following trajectories of feeling and sensations, creating new spaces...the micro and the macro - one moving into the other, merging, separating. The line says I exist, I am. It travels on its own volition. It is.

In the collages inspired by Nelly Sachs there was a sharp intensity there, expressed through hard clear colours overlaid by a contrasting flow of lines. My later work did away with colour and dealt with white spaces, focussing increasingly on the power of the line because I found in it a clarity, a definiteness as well as a many layered suggestiveness. I experimented with forms in pen and ink whilst creating characters for a fantasy fable entitled 'Patina' that I was writing at the time. The forms and shapes came from mythic depths, emerging almost as archetypes. As I worked on and became increasingly comfortable with the line moving across a white space, drawing became for me a form of meditation on the essential patterns of life as expressed through nature. Cutting through the soft flesh of excess, I removed all that was unwanted until only what was basic remained. Patterns of nature frozen on paper...skeletons of trees, stones, leaves...then even more basic than that... reduced in some cases to abstract forms. The essence. Elemental. I see myself as an intrinsic part of nature, not an outsider. In her I find metaphors to express my own being and the web I belong to. I have used my drawings in a number of my books. Only in two cases have they been illustrative. In the rest, they exist as independent entities. In my latest book of poems 'Written In Sand', they actively interface with the poems.

- Randhir Khare