NEW DELHI, May 24: A painter invariably chooses his brush to express his imagination while a poet’s mind flows through his pen, they say. But, for young artist Tarab Khan, painting and poetry are perfectly complementary forces as echoed in her current exhibition here.
Reality and fantasy come colliding in a riot of colours as this 29-year-old artist lets her “whimsical imagination” run wild on the canvas, for a body of work, aptly titled ‘Whimsical 2’, which opened up for view recently.
“For me painting and poetry are not different but only complementary sides of my life. I write poems and and do paintings on them and vice versa, like you see them on display alongside some of the paintings here,” says Tarab.
So, the viewer is invited to dive into an abstract pool of colours splashed on the canvas as in ‘A Bunch of Lilies’ or soar high into a ‘Flight of Fantasy’ as also it takes him on a visual and verbal journey ‘In the Continuum of Space & Time’ to the wider universe, collapsed in a frame.
While majority of her work completed over the last few years, are in a single frame, some are done in diptych and triptych too, magnifying the scale of the colourful spectrum.
“For me, two paintings are very special, ‘The Fury’ and ‘A Piece’ as both in a way represent my innermost feelings on canvas. While ‘Fury’ I did while I was literally furious and angry in my mind, ‘A Piece’ was inspired in the aftermath of the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai,” Tarab told.
“The 26/11 attack on Taj Hotel in Mumbai was very disturbing for me and so I painted this work and called it ‘A Piece’ and also wrote a poem on it, which I have displayed beside the painting. It talks about communal discord over just ‘a piece’ of land,” she adds.
For this Hyderabad-based “non-conformist artist” who doesn’t believe in boundaries and narrow-identities imposed by society, region or religion, art comes as a unifying and philanthropic tool, as much as expressing one’s sense of aesthetics.
“I am happy to be born as a human. My birth place, religion and language is all incidental but the universal factor is my being a human and my art only aspires to express the wonderful imaginations that our human minds are capable of imagining,” she said.
The use of rich, vibrant colour suffused with deeper philosophy embodied in the poem, adds a rhythmic feel to the canvases on display as it manifests in works like ‘The Resonance’, ‘Space in a Kaleidoscope’ or ‘Like a Mermaid in the Sky I Flew’ among others.
As per her inspiration, Tarab says her paintings are “dreamlike” and “thought-provoking” and are born out a “childlike curiosity” of “contemplating the universe” around her.
“How could I be inspired by only one thought or one culture or with only one dream when there are so many different ways in which I could feel and connect with the world around me? And with so many visions of mine glancing through the brilliant kaleidoscope of this universe,” she said.
The exhibition at the India Habitat Centre is on view till May 25. Part of the proceeds of the sale will support the NGO Smile Foundation, which works on welfare projects for underprivileged children. (PTI)
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