Floating forms with a feminine angle

Farida's acrylic on paper works were all abstract creations. In one of them one felt that green gems had been held in a mesh of fine mesh of pale green cloth against a ruby red backdrop and that some of the gems were falling from the gauze. Some of the falling geometrical shapes were green were others were gray and red and one gold, though which the backdrop could be seen. Pale gold streaks were found at the top and bottom of the composition of the floating gauze like creation and the cascading gem-like objects.

In her other untitled work one found bars of blue, indigo, purple and mauve. In the indigo was an oblong piece with tiny black and blue geometrical motifs in it. Balancing with this were some time black squiggles at the bottom, floating on the mauve setting and these appeared like fragments of twining silk or wings or insects.

Bars of white, touched with moss green and smudges of gray were found in another creation. They appeared like some parallel planks of white washed wood that had got smudged with soot and dirt. The wood was found in a setting of gray green and below, on a background of dark green were some blue, green and silver geometrical shapes, five in number.

"Four moons" brought in four differently coloured circles set in a rectangle of red and blue, floating in a larger sphere of purple and blue. The moons were blue, black and white, orange, red and gray-blue, yellow and black and green, yellow and blue. Below the moons was a large rectangle of mauve, yellow ochre with squiggles of gray all over it.

"Floating forms" had an indigo backdrop in which mysterious forms in rectangle floated in unison. On top one found a pink and black form surrounded with white sketched lines in lops curls and slides. At the bottom was a white form, like some silver package which too was surrounded with interweaving lines in delicate blue, black, gray and red.

Farida says that the working environment was wonderful at Santiniketan but although theoretically the lessons there were good the teachers were not necessarily better than the ones that she had at the Institute of Fine Arts DU. Her teachers had included Nandalal Mukherjee, Proshanto Shao and Dilip Mitra. The artists that she admires most are S M Sultan, Mohammed Kibria and Abul Brik Alvi. Antony Tapia and Cornel Parker are her favourite artists overseas.

She works as her inspiration comes and at no particular fixed time of the day. The works at the exhibition at Chuwa Gallery had been done at Santiniketan and Dhaka. She feels confident that our Bangladeshi artists do not lag behind the Indian counterparts in any way. She herself goes in for acrylic and paper as her medium as she feels most comfortable in them while experimenting and creating in her nouveau vision. "I have no particular reason for doing abstracts: it's just that I enjoy doing them most. I have done some realistic work earlier on a commercial basis."

Farida Yesmin, coming from Shibbari, Bogra, has attended puppet making workshop conducted by Mustafa Monwar in 1999, a painting workshop in Kolkata Nandanik, India in 1998 and a water colour group class conducted by the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in 1994. She has participated in over 15 joint exhibitions at Tokyo, Kolkata, Santiniketan, and Dhaka.