Art exhibition: Artwork inspired by Tagore’s poem

Samina Ali’s mixed media paintings have a story to tell.

ISLAMABAD:

A paintings exhibition inagurated on Thursday, at the Nomad Gallery, invites visitors to interpret the artist’s narrative. Samina Ali brings poetry to canvas with her soft hues and intricate creations at the “Odyssey: an Ode to philosophy.”

Shifting her palette from vibrant colours to earthy and mellow tones, the artist shifts away from her comfort zone as she uses space sparingly instead of using heavy textures that is usually her forte. Her inspiration for this exhibition came from Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, “In one salutation to thee, my God.”

Like a rain cloud of July hung low with its burden of unshed showers, let all my mind bend down at thy door in one salutation to thee.

Let all my songs gather together their diverse strains into a single current and flow to a sea of silence in one salutation to thee.

Samina works predominantly with mixed media as she layers her work with a subtlety that makes each of her pieces look painstaking created with patience and love.

Fusing vaddri or marbling and brush strokes along with contemporary collage to create multi-layered works. These medium to large-scale collages are characterised by assemblages of paper, gold and silver leaf, tea and paint washes, and script. “I am an avid collector of little fragments of paper, drawings, and photographs and even foil wrappings.I’ve incorporated all of these in my work,” stated the artist.

Letters have been painted in flowing brush strokes resembling arabesques in these paintings by Samina Ali. PHOTO: MUHAMMAD JAVAID/EXPRESS

Cuttings taken from old miniatures are reworked so that they are no longer simply illustrations, but symbolise elements of love, peace, or turmoil, superimposed or inset into the complex surface.  In this way, in the present series paintings of birds by Miskeen, a well-known miniature painter during the reign of Jahangir, are used as symbols of peace and love, as well as evoking a sense of nostalgia.

What makes Ali’s work even more intriguing is that each piece manages to evoke a sense of storytelling even without obvious indications. A small courtyard image is torn and pasted with a larger jharoka in the middle as she plays with paint with flowing brush strokes across these architectural excerpts.

Many visitors seemed to share the observation, “ Samina is in experimental mode now.” Islamabad Serena Hotel General Manager Michel Galopin, who was present at the inauguration, called Samina’s work ,”Art that will live forever.”

These deeply personal paintings are a reflection of Ali’s moods and thoughts, and her innate desire for a sense of peace.

She refuses to make statements about herself or her work, asking instead that the viewer find her on the complex surfaces of her oeuvre: “The question is not what I do and why I do it…What I do, search for me and I am there on the paper,” said a statement by the gallery’s curator.

The exhibition will continue till January 15.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2013.