About a dozen of these figures went up on the walls of Faraar gallery at T2F as part of Raza’s 19-piece ‘Black & White’ series on Tuesday. In it, she displays a range of drawing prowess from barely there nudes to layered abstracts with embedded elements of anatomy, depending on how you choose to see it.
The series, she explained to The Express Tribune, is the outcome of some time off that she took after she felt that the “thread” between her and the artwork had grown thinner. While she has been constantly sketching, doodling and drawing (with group shows) over three decades, she has also been busy teaching high school students art for nine years in London where she lives. She has kept up with drawing, which she studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, but in the middle meandered into working for a dotcom in Singapore, a florist and a café in New York and substitute teacher in London.
Some of the pieces in ‘Black & White’ are abstract, but Raza very kindly acknowledged that the use of the word becomes a barrier for some people. Perhaps it was the teacher in her that made her quite happy to try and flesh out her interpretation of the word. She explained that the more she looked at abstract work by other artists, the more she saw how meticulous it was underneath it all. “It was almost clinical,” she said. “Just by shaping things, playing with size, constantly altering [you can show] something with different aspects, sometimes from very close, or from very far.” Thus, the figures become almost “flexible”. In a rib cage, emerges a head. A Rodinesque figure wrestles with a leg nearly marbled by lines. A rounded buttock cleaves to a socket.
Her combination of the abstract and real in the observation of the figure is aided by the medium she chooses: ink. The runnier it is, the better and she starts with barely a jot of it on the creamy thick water-colour paper before brush, sticks, quills and even her hands go to work. “The ink should really allow [me] to mould something, change it, give it a working form,” she said, and then added to explain that the blurred ‘strokes’ are “like [the effect of] a soft focus lens in a camera”. It is this merger of the taut, leashes of lines with sinuous gray rills that give her figures movement and heft.
While the layered works might appeal to some who lean towards the abstract, it is perhaps Raza’s gesture drawings that might stand out the most for some viewers. These types of drawings are, as she explained it, a “loose capturing of form and a good exercise in observation to show the shifts in weight”. Sometimes people prefer them as the finished work because they offer a closeness with the raw energy of the artist. When asked how she knows when to stop a piece, Raza tips her hat to instinct and intuition but doesn’t forget to mention that sheer practice is an important factor.
Some of the pieces just take one sitting, others nearly five.
“I feel I am more of a drawer than a painter,” she admitted. “I am interested in the quality of the line.” And that, perhaps is where she draws the line.
The show runs till Sunday
Published in The Express Tribune, February 22nd, 2012.
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