An artist par excellence

(Continued from yesterday...)
Celestial colour use and composition maturity, decorative motif, soothing texture coupled with exquisite tonal gradation appear very strong in Nasreen Begum's work. The artist, with her innovative themes and neo-Bengal wash techniques, has portrayed women figures of multitude expressions and lively styles; enriched oriental figurative paintings with batik medium; depicted oriental styled line based paintings and formed lines with keeping blank white space on paper. Her works seem to have the texture of prints and etching. The language of Nasreen Begum's art is sharp and intense like poetry and is prominent with regard to both subjects and techniques. So, both the general viewers and the art connoisseurs can draw the Rasa from her painting.
“It is nature around that inspires me and eggs me on to work incessantly, filling my drawers with sheets of watercolour. I take in the sky, wind, sunrise, moonbeams, flowers, leaves, tendrils and pollen dust. The changing course of the seasons, especially before the rains, when the leaves are shed, also influences me. The months from Baishakh to Srabon move me most in my paintings. The fallen flowers and leaves on the roads are elements that inspire me. The starry and cloudy skies and the full moon inspire me, too. Elements like rivers and mountains also stir me up,” said Nasreen Begum.
The artist's personality is that of a disciplined individual, straightforward with apt sensibility. “I love bright sunlit days with full of colours. There are so many elements of nature; I will not finish capturing them all in a single span of life. My entire life consciousness constitutes the core of my painting,” she added.
Goya, Boticelli, Van Gogh, Picasso, Michelangelo, Salvador Dali and Abdur Rahman Chughtai are among the well-known artists she is moved by. Boticelli's female figures, in particular, influenced Nasreen's women's portraits in her oriental art creations. Nasreen's picturesque women faces speak of the happy coexistence of man and nature. She portrays women in the style of the Bengal school. The features of her women tell stories of the species from various parts of Bangladesh making her brushes pray like counting beads of rosary on papers as her devotional strokes and dots suggest.
Through the use of colour, movement, light, shades and various forms, she searches the subconscious of Sigmund Freud in the mystical land of Lalon. The aesthetic unity she achieves through a melding of two separate and opposing concepts is amazing in their clarity and depth. The artist's popular series include “Cacti”, “Cacti Woman”, “Women Figure”, “Reflections”, “Creation”, “After Ceremony”, “Sea-Shell”, “Image from Seashore”, “Door of a new life”, “Cityscape”, “Landscape”, “Seashore”, “Seashore Life”, “Impression” “Heritage”, “Sea Girl”, “Story of a Leaf” and “Fallen Leaves”.
The artist has bagged many awards and honours including 'Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin Gold Medal', conferred by the Faculty of Fine Arts (FFA) of Dhaka University. A professor at the Department of Oriental Art of FFA of Dhaka University, Nasreen Begum completed her BFA from the Department she teaches. Later, she obtained her MFA (Printmaking) from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, Baroda of Gujrat, India. She has held seven solo exhibitions along with a duet and a number of group exhibitions both at home and abroad including Russia, Germany, Denmark, Japan, China, Iran, Czech Republic, Pakistan, UAE, Norway, Nepal, India and Indonesia.