I will be inspired only by the sensation that the season arouses in me: the icy purity of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the nuances of foliage.
Henri Matisse, 'Notes d'un peintre’ originally in La Grande Revue Paris, 25 December 1908.
Dr. (Professor) Farida Zaman, Professor and Chairman of the Department of Drawing and Painting, at the Faculty of Fine Arts, of the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, is one of Bangladesh’s most significant artists. For well over three decades she has diligently reflected her homeland, her people and the complex interactions between them. Farida Zaman has been honoured multiple times at home and abroad, and continues to produce artworks which intrigue, delight and demonstrate the continuing inequality of the sexes in Bangladesh.
In exhibition catalogues, online, and in magazine and newspaper articles, much has already been written about Farida Zaman, and her innovative artworks. She has both championed the under trodden, and the role of women in her society. Dr. Zaman has frequently exhibited with other women, thereby adding to a broad spectrum of works by women for society, and thereby extending our insight into those differing worlds. Here, I have sought a fresh insight into the works of Dhaka artist Dr. (Professor) Farida Zaman, focussing upon her intense use of the colour blue in her works, trying to connect the dots, as it were.
Anyone familiar with Dr. (Professor) Farida Zaman’s oeuvre, may come to realise that for this artist blue becomes revealed as an evocative azure, an enthralling, beguiling blue, an amazingly rendered and poignantly placed colour which as a catalyst for reflections and triggers to our enlightenment.
For the knowledgeable, the enquirer, or the quester it may come as no surprise that blue, so familiar in Farida Zaman’s works, was a great favourite too of that great Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore (Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur). Tagore was a painter too, and produced somewhere in the region of 2,500 paintings and, it has been said, blue was his favourite colour, one which he poignantly expressed as ‘rup’ (form), ‘lavanya’ (loveliness), or ‘ananda’ (joy), and a colour which had been introduced (through the purple/blue Petrea flower), into Tagore’s place of learning, in Santiniketan, India.
That flower, planted by Tagore’s friend W.W. Pearson, delighted Tagore’s senses; for that grand master of words had a colour perception difficulty, and perceived no red hue in purple, but perceived it as a deep blue. “Neel ronge aamar gabheer aanando” (Deep is my joy in the blue colour) Tagore would often say, he must, therefore, have been delighted at seeing those dark blue flowers blooming all around his house (Konark) in Santiniketan, which they still do until today. Farida Zaman may have seen them before collecting her Ph. D. (1995) from that very Visva Bharati University, in Santiniketan, which Tagore had initiated back in December 1901.
An enquiry into the colour blue’s entanglement with Farida Zaman would be remiss if we dismissed those shades of the stunning ultramarine (from the Latin Ultramarinus, literally beyond the seas) which sparked Yves Klein’s ‘International Klein Blue’, following Klein’s fascination with the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who had written “First there is nothing, then deep nothing, and finally blue depth”.
We must also tilt our metaphorical, or art critical, hats to the lapis lazuli (Latin -lapis, stone, and Persian [lājevard], later Lazuli meaning blue), stealthily ground to make the glorious (ultramarine) blue of Giotto (Giotto di Bondone) and later of Titian. Lapis Lazuli has been mined in Afghanistan for over 6,000 years and its discovery had fuelled the use of that stunning, deep blue across Europe.
Between 1901 and 1904, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso had painted his way through a melancholic Blue Period. This was, effectively, a period when he produced a number of mute, almost monochromatic, paintings in shades of blue and blue-green which he had begun after the death of his Catalan friend, the writer and artist, Carles Casagemas i Coll, in Paris, February 1901.
Those paintings, however, drew nothing from ultramarine, nor Lapis Lazuli, but were developed from mixtures of Prussian blue, Navy and Cobalt blue and, according to Picasso’s biographer and friend Pierre Daix, the maestro Picasso had indicated that “It was thinking about Casagemas that got me started painting in blue.”
In 2012, Farida Zaman participated in the Bangladesh women artists’ association SHAKO exhibition, in tribute to Pablo Picasso's ‘Blue Period’. For that exhibition, Dr. (Professor) Farida Zaman tendered ‘Sufia's Blue Heaven’ alongside paintings from Kanak Chanpa Chakma, Naima Haque, Rokeya Sultana, Azadi Parvin, Afsana Sharmin, Kuhu Plamondon, Nasreen Begum, Fareha Zeba, Sulekha Choudhury, Rebeka Sultana Moly and Farzana Islam Milky. It was an exhibition of paintings inspired by Pablo Picasso’s ‘Blue period’. Of her involvement with the ‘Picasso Workshop Art Camp’ at Athena (in Uttar Badda, Dhaka, Bangladesh), Professor Zaman was quoted (by Fayza Haq, in Bangladesh’s newspaper The Star), as saying “I wanted to use the blue in the context of Bangladeshi women. I was forced to use them as a guide.”
At this point it would be easy to address a dialectic regarding Farida Zaman, and that infamous Bengali blue, known world wide as Indigo blue. Dark Indigo blue is rendered from the species of the Indigofera (tintoria) plant (an evergreen shrub native to regions such as India and Bangladesh), which produces what has become known as ‘true indigo’ (which the Greeks had named indikon, or from India), and which has become deeply enmeshed into the psyche of Bangladesh.
Indigo, was a blue so beloved of royalty and aristocracy that it was a main item of international trade from the 16th to the 19th century. Kathinka Sinha Kerkhoff (in her book Colonising Plants in Bihar 1760-1950, p122) has indicated that all was not well in the production of this colour, and that “Indigo cultivation had since long been a source of contention between the English planters and 'the natives’. The resistance in 1860 was referred to as 'the Indigo Disturbances' by contemporaries, and was later on described by scholars as the 'Blue Mutiny’”. The Blue Mutiny was one of the first movements, in Bengal, where the local peasantry had combined to rise up the raising of rents, cheap prices and extra legal sanctions. This historical farmer’s revolt of 1859-60 (known as Neel Bidroho) slipped into the creative imagination to become reimagined in Dinabandhu Mitra’s play, Nil Darpan (or Mirror of Indigo, published in 1860, with the English translation being published as Nil Darpan, or The Indigo Planting Mirror, a drama translated from the Bengali by ‘A Native’ and published by C.H.Manuel, Calcutta Printing and Publishing Press, 1861).
Through lapis lazuli; through indigo; through the growing of Bangladesh flax and its delicate light blue flower; through the stunning blue of the Bay of Bengal, being the mirror of the sky, we can debate the predominance of blue within Farida Zaman’s motherland, and its influence, over decades, on that artist’s creative work.
Bangladesh (formerly East Bengal) is a ‘riverine’ country, with at least 700 rivers and tributaries seeping into its land. One long river bisects the country. It enters the country and is known as the Brahmaputra, easing its way out of India. That river flows south. Slowly it becomes the Jammna, then the Padma and eventually, as it draws towards the famous mangrove forest (Sunderban, said to be the largest in the world), it forms the Ganges Delta and eventually the Bay of Bengal. Due to the plethora of water seeping its way through the country, in autumn, misty mornings in Bangladesh become blue, following the masking blue of the evenings and having taken over from the luminous blue skies of Bangladesh’s summer.
The audience gets a sense of this, within just a few seconds of film director Anwar Chowdhury’s film documentary ‘Joler Shilpamonjory' or ‘Waterworks’ (2006-2007)as a boat is propelled down Bangladesh’s River Meghna.
Within Chowdhury’s film, Farida Zaman returns to the land of her birth (Sachiakhali in the Chandpur district within the Chittagong Division of Bangladesh). We are shown that scene where the blueness of the sky reaches to touch its mirror in the sea. The difference between sky and sea are all but indistinguishable, save for an essence of pinkness developing within what we recognise to be clouds. Two crafts come into view. The scene is still cast over with blue. The blue eventually dissolves to reveal the artist (Farida Zaman) sitting in a fishing craft relaying her biographical story, speaking of fisherfolk, of casting nets, of how those memories become painted onto canvases, or work with water on paper. The sky and the river are both blue, broken only by the boatman’s shirt of pink and the sky gradually becoming roseate in its dawning. Skilfully the blue ebbs away to reveal Farida Zaman speaking “I am told that I was born in Chandpur”. She gazes towards the changing colour of the horizon, as if reflecting on her past.
In the synopsis for the film ‘Waterworks’, you can read how Farida Zaman “…describes how her childhood memories of boats, fishing nets, fishes, fishermen, water dots and other subjects (are) reflected into her painting canvas.” It give an insight into the importance the concept of ‘the motherland’ on this artist.
In 2010, Farida Zaman presented a predominantly blue acrylic painting centring on a young woman, dressed in an orange sari. The character has a bird in her hand and is titled ‘Sufia in Joy-1’. The exhibition is ‘Rooted Creativity (2)’, the second gala exhibition held at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, in Dhaka. Interviewed by Fayza Haq, Dr. (Professor) Zaman explained “My pictures are spun around a girl called Sufia. I've brought in boats and water which play such an important part of our lives. Fishing nets are suggested then actually brought in.”
In many of Faridah Zaman’s latter paintings, ‘Sufia’ is rendered in green, or orange, at times her black hair become blue, recalling Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Her Hair’ (La Chevelure, 1857).
Blue tresses, like a shadow-stretching tent, You shed the blue of heavens round and far. Along its downy fringes as I went I reeled half-drunken to confuse the scent Of oil of coconuts, with musk and tar.
From Her Hair, Poems of Baudelaire (Roy Campbell trans, New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
The name ‘Sufia’ is possibly Arabic in origin, and suggests a person who follows the Islamic spiritual religion, Sufism. Someone called Sufia has a clean, or pure, heart.
The Sufi mystic saint Semnani (1280-1386), when reiterating the seven mystical veils (centres of personal progress from egoism to a divine centring), suggested that the second veil was ‘blue light’, which was an indication of the soul. He did not speak of an orange veil, but pointed to a ‘red light’ veil which indicated heart and a ‘yellow light’, that of spirit. In the the Sufi fable ‘The Conference of Birds’ also known as the Mantiq Ut-tair, by the twelfth century Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar, the ocean is asked why it is so blue. The response …..
“ I am troubled because I am separated from my friend. Because of my insufficiency
I am not worthy of him, so I put on a garment of blue as a sign of the remorse I feel. In my distress the beaches of my lips are dried up, and because of the fire of my love I am in a turmoil. Could I find but a single drop of the celestial water of Kausar, I should be in possession of the gate of eternal life. Lacking this drop I shall die from desire with the thousand others who perish on the way.”
The water filled, ’riverine’, land from which Farida Zaman hails; her ever closeness to the sea, water, and endless skies give some credence to the notion of her blue artworks stemming from her environment and her fond attachment to those enduring, hard working, female figures like ‘Sufia’. Those industrious women are the backbone of any society, Bangladesh included. The blue in Farida Zaman’s paintings is not just emotive, but the byproduct of practical observation. Her blue is historical (maybe a tad nostalgic too) as well as being societal and, at times, controversial in what continues to be a male dominated South Asian society.
Farida Zaman’s ‘Sufia’ is seen in the artist’s works as far back as 2006, (in a catalogue for her solo painting exhibition ‘My Country, My Love’, shown at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, Dhaka). The character ‘Sufia’, the embodiment of the Bangladesh woman, is named in ‘Sufia’, ’Sufia’s Dream’ and ‘Sufia with her Bird - 1’ though, in essence ‘Sufia’ is all the female characters within that catalogue and many more throughout the artist’s oeuvre, with or without blue.
Farida Zaman’s ‘Fish and Net’ (2009) demonstrates the artist’s skill in colour usage, with fish rendered in hues of yellow and orange/red against an ultramarine background of water, and a threatening mass of dark blue/black spreading from above. Another ‘Sufia with Bird’ (2009) weaves various blues with green and dashes of red. The girl wears a white sari to match the white of the bird, while ‘Rain’ (2010, but included within her 2013 exhibition catalogue ‘Bound to the Soil) sparkles with blue, both the deeper blue of the rain bespeckled water and the lighter blue of the rain itself. Of course the blueness is offset by flecks of yellow, some turning green, and just a hint of red giving the blue its blueness. In that same (2013) catalogue ‘Marshy Land’ 3 (2012) and 6 (2012), though in a more abstract form, render the blueness of water as it seeps into otherwise dry land.
From 2006, through to more current times, Farida Zaman has portrayed her central character, Sufia, from ‘Midnight Dream’ (2006), to ‘Sufia with her Bird - 1 (2006), ‘Sufia with Bird’ (already mentioned, 2009) ’Peace’ (2010), ‘Love’ (2010) and through to ‘Sufia’ in 2015. One non-Sufia painting ‘My Beautiful Country’ (2017), renders a mere glimpse of that artist’s country in a splendid (predominantly blue) semi-abstract work. There are, of course, many other works where artist Farida Zaman delights in her use of blue. I have mentioned but a few, from her oeuvre.
Red, green and gold are the official colours of the country of Bangladesh. They are the colours of its nationalism, the colours of the proud flag fought so courageous for. And yet the aforementioned blue has its place of mention too. Blue is the colour of indigo which Bangladesh people grew, fought and died for. Blue is the morning and the evening of that riverine country; the summer sky, the simple flax colour and of Farida Zaman.
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