In 1971 Souza read about Jonas Salk's scientific work in the field of DNA and the discovery of Salk's work had a profound and lasting influence on his paintings, especially his work during the 70s. In the same year, he discovered the "Bhagavad Gita", a classical Indian text. It is the section in the "Mahabarata" where Krishna the God describes to Arjuna the warrior the nature of Reality. Although Souza had grown up in India he had been raised a Catholic and claimed to have learned of the Bhagavad Gita through American scholars after arriving in the United States. His discovery of the Gita, coupled with Jonas Salk's work, brought to Souza a tremendous sense of joy after a difficult start to his new life in America. (1971 was also the year of his son's birth, which undoubtedly contributed to his exuberance.) About his painting he wrote, "I want to delight my fellow men with swooning, swirling color applied on canvas with the energy of pure Joy....I love...color is the staff of life, for man does not live on bread alone."

Although Souza never consciously acknowledged his debt to Cezanne's flatenning of objects and elimination of the grey tones that had traditionally been used to create atmospheric perspective; one is reminded of Cezanne's foundation in Souza's notes about his works he was making in 1971. "I am able to get 'tone' from pure color now without the use of black for grading it....I have eliminated black ivory or lamp entirely from my palette. I have also eliminated "line," the black line and cross-hatchings I used to gird and spine my paintings with in the past....Now I use line only for drawing on paper, not painting."

In this present landscape depicting Manattan, the joy that Souza described two years earlier is still here, the light represented symbolically through the presence of the sun and also in its bright jewel colours and thickness of paint (which in itself creates planes for light to land on). "A visible object," he wrote, "is made up of a radation of tones and reflected light." The use of impasto allowed his tones and reflections to multiply beyond the superficial delineation of objects on a two-dimensional surface. Additionally, the use of the dots and dashes vocabulary that he created to represent DNA as the building blocks of Life become his tool by which he could eliminate the line in the traditional sense "to gird and spine" his paintings. (Shelley Souza, 2007).