Painter Gieve Patel was none too happy when his colleagues on the Board asked him to design IFA’s logo. “I’m not good at this sort of thing,” he protested. But the trustees felt that he was being unduly modest, and pressed him to give it a try.

Gieve did not come empty handed to the next Board meeting. What he brought with him, however, was not a set of logo studies, but a slide of one of his paintings. He would have no objection, he said, if IFA based its logo on this painting. The trustees jumped at the idea.

The painting is called ‘Water Tank at Nargol: Boy Bathing Buffaloes’. IFA’s logo borrows the top right-hand section of the painting. It shows a bird in full flight, climbing steeply, caught at the very last instant before it leaves the frame of the painting.

When something feels absolutely right, we often neglect to ask ourselves why. It seems unnecessary to do so. The trustees responded spontaneously to the suddenly soaring bird, but they did not stop to ponder the reasons why the image worked so well for IFA.

Perhaps the reasons are plain to see. The rising bird evokes much that IFA upholds: freedom expressed, the imagination in easy flight, the disregard for limits, and the joy of escape.