Faces of Life
A student of the acclaimed Lahore artist, Iqbal Hussain, Farazeh Syed’s recent exhibition at the Unicorn Gallery in Karachi (January 13 – 20) displayed a similar symmetry in her delineation of the female form, where voluptuous women with a traditional look, wearing garish colours, dominate the canvas. Iqbal Hussain paints women from Heera Mandi, the red-light district of Lahore. Syed, who has been a student of Hussain for nearly 20 years now, says she paints people she connects with and likes, from all walks of life, and not any particular segment of society. But it is women who dominate her canvases in pose and repose, and in this particular series, in mauves, blues, oranges and reds, the characteristics of her subjects, their expressions and personality are particularly obscured by a visual orgy of colour.
Syed’s figurative technique has a post-Impressionist feel. While she cites Van Gogh and Gaugin as her favourite artists, the gaunt expressions and modular lines of her figures – her ladies, Sonia, Shehnaz, Shabana and Salma – display a similar emotional honesty. But they do not seem to possess any remarkable trait or quality that differentiates them from a commonplace woman – the ordinariness of their existence makes them all the more realistic.
Syed states that she is still discovering and experimenting with her figures which are currently veering more towards the simplistic. Her current series, inundated with colour, is in contrast to previous works where her canvases were duller, with strong beige and brown overtones. Syed has made quite a few self-portraits, and over the years the colours have progressed from dull to bright. Included in this exhibition were ink and brush and charcoal drawings from previous collections, which displayed the progression in her artistic skills in the past decade or so.
A teacher by profession, Syed is self-motivated and self-made, guided by a teacher, who she says only steered her in the right direction and never laid down any rules. What was missing, however, from the exhibit was a concise artistic statement on the artist’s inspiration and motives. But, I suppose she wanted her canvases to speak for themselves.
This article was originally published in the February 2012 issue of Newsline.
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