Of nature and life

Bird on Fossil

Now completing her final three semesters at the University of Alternative Development (UDA), her teachers are younger than her, as she counts her beginning from the Institute of Fine Arts, Dhaka University. Driven and determined, she blends abstraction with reality, presenting gentle images, such as the moon, birds, fish and exotic flowers by night. With her translucent colours and poetic delineation, she has mesmerised her viewers. Her inspiration, she says, is Salvador Dali and other living masters at home.

Queenie's training overseas was a compact course of three months at the School of Visual Art at New York. Her subject there was "Basic drawing for the media". She says the basics there were the same as what she had been taught in Dhaka, at the pre-degree level, before she went in for Oriental Art section. The basics of art education -- like all creative work -- the world over, are the same, she says. She adds, however, that the lifestyle there is different; and so one is exposed to a greater variety of subjects overseas, especially in the West. In our country, she says, we tend to be preoccupied by overwhelming socio-political and economic situations. "The grammar was the same, so I was able to pick it up quickly,"

However, the teachers were different, she says. John Foot, her teacher, once the designer of Vogue, gave so much of himself -- without wasting a single minute -- that she learnt more than what she had gleaned by the available teacher-student rapport she had had before, at Dhaka." I was taught to pick up the simple things in life, like the exotic and iridescent flora and fauna around me, and enlarge on those themes to create beautiful images --taken from my environment and coloured by my imagination. Despite the relatively brief period at New York, she was encouraged to sail forth in her own world, brimming with courage and confidence.

Queenie says that she took themes such as bogs, underwater life, the flying weary bird and the stagnant natural life after the rains. She wants her viewers to see beauty in the simple things of life, in nature and mankind. She wishes the gallery-goers to enjoy the loveliness of even the dry and dusty sky, and paths around in the countryside. She finds even the yellow and brown marshes a thing of beauty, which is joy forever. The artist delineates even "amaboshsha" --the period of the month when one cannot see the moon-- which, according to our local myths, brings bad luck to some. In that particular painting, done on that theme of the moonless night, one sees flowers, weeds, fish and the sky enveloped in dark hues: done in deep shade. Despite the apparent use of deep tints of blue, black and green, the painting is pulsating with energy.

Voila! Another woman painter has proved her worth.