He's one o the busiest people in Pittsburgh besides being a radio announcer, movie producer, and director.

Haris is also a well-respected artist.

Tonia Caruso profiles this painter from India whose creative mind is always at work.

Good evenin and welcome to music from India.

This is Harish Saluja.

He's a radio co-host.

What I would like to do is have a tracking shot.

Filmmaker.

And he also runs the Asian arts and culture organization, Silk Screen.

Harish Saluja is an artist in every sense of the word.

You know, everybody finds their bliss in life.

They figure it ou whether it's, you know, climbing Mount Everest or, you know, doing social work.

I cannot imagine life without creating.

Creating is something Harish has always enjoyed, even as a child in India must have been five given crayons to draw with.

And I think I was in grade one.

I found out that I came first in my class in art class, and I still remember our, my teacher very proudly telling me how good an artist I was, and I'm sure she said that for everybody, but I believed her and and continued to paint.

And paint he did throughout his teenage and young adult years.

But deciding on a career in the arts wasn't easy.

Harish grew up in a family of successful doctors and professors, and in college he studied engineering.

Once out of school, though, he chose to live his life in America doing the things he loved the most.

I think the influence of my mother, who was very much artistically inclined and a musician herself and a writer, that I found extreme joy and solace in things artistic, whether it was reading, writing, poetry, music, particularly painting.

But Harish will tell you, becoming a recognized artist wasn't easy.

When he arrived in Pittsburgh in the early 1970s, he fell on tough times until he took a job with a technical magazine publishing company.

I started as the junior most person in four years.

I was running the company, and 2 or 3 years later I became a partner and owned it, and I stayed there for almost 30 years.

All the while, though, Harish found time to paint and even exhibit his work.

To This Day, and despite his successes as a radio announcer on WESA radio and an award winning producer director for movies like The Journey.

Painting remains his foremost passion.

The walls of his home just south of Pittsburgh are filled with his colorful pieces.

So this is, one of my favorite paintings.

Some of it are reminders of the place he was born and raised.

I told you about the school I went to in the Himalayas, 7500ft above sea level.

And it was a very exclusive school.

And it has a lake of places called Nainital.

And the lake is so pristine and so beautiful.

So if you look carefully, you're looking at a lake, looking at birds.

I decided instead of painting any particular thing, just capture the the feeling of the of the color of the lake and the reflections of the lake.

And that's what it is, this abstract way of painting Harish adopted while he was in his mid-twenties.

It was a shif from the traditional landscapes, figurative and portraits he once painted.

It falls under the category of abstract expressionism, which I still think was one of the most beautiful times after the Impressionists in the world and was American.

You know, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline and others like that beautiful, beautiful work, you know, not enclosed by traditional ideas, not suppressed by the how the color should look like, but exploding like Jackson did.

My work is generally interpretation of certain themes, things, strangely enough, like music.

It's a continual theme in his paintings.

So I did a whole series of abstract expressionist paintings on classical music.

I did Mozart series and Bach series.

Most of those paintings are gone and so on and so forth.

Then I did jazz series.

They tend to be more metallic and with brighter, more primary colors.

This is how I hear jazz, is how I see jazz.

Then I did the Indian Raga series music series, which got very, very good reviews, New York Times and everywhere else.

Some of these paintings he featured in an exhibition of his work in 2011 called Progression.

We were debating as to what we should show, and so we could not put all of it because we didn't have any Bach and Mozart series paintings left.

But we did have a couple of Raga series paintings, so we put to a Raga three Indian music series paintings there.

We did some Mandala, paintings.

Buddhist have been doing this for 2000 years.

And then I did a series of some back to figurative work which I had not done in the 60s, which was the Hindu deities also showcased in the exhibit his miniature collection, a total departure from the large scale paintings he typically paints.

And that's a whole new world, three inch by five inch intricate paintings, which I did with the mixed media, with markers and oil markers and watercolor markers.

And so.

So the progression was my progression.

Progression over the years as an artist, watching this artist work is indeed an experience.

He has a nervous energy that he channels on to canvas, but not just one canvas, 8 to 10 canvases all being worked on at the same time.

I generally walk into my studio with absolutely no plans at all.

What I'm thinking about are my problems, and I get up after a few minutes and I start mixing paint, whatever I feel like, and then I start applying it.

An hour or 2 or 3 later.

I find that I haven't gone into the studio troubled with all these headaches and burdens, and I've come out joyou and my heart calms and tranquil, which helps as now, in his mid-sixties, Harish was dealing with the diagnosis of an unsettling disease.

He has prostate cancer, fo which he is receiving treatment.

But instead of being distraught, he's more focused and more determined than ever before Hopefully cut ou all negative people for my life.

I do not do negative things anymore.

I've canceled most of my meetings.

I only take the ones which are good for society.

You bring me joy, you bring them joy or I can help them and so forth.

You know there are so many encounters we have which are primarily wasting of time.

It's wonderful because it's it totally relieves me from all those pressures.

And that way of thinking has left Harish with an unexpected peace of mind.

What I want to do is continue putting paint on canvas and see what comes out.

I particularly want to do, abstract expressionist landscapes, for example.

I want to do more of those.

I want to do some Mandala paintings.

I do want to be able to do at least 1 or 2 films if possible.

And there's a very interesting book I'm writing, which I would like to finish, but but I'll take it as it comes.

But these are the immediate goals which I have, which seem possible and achievable.