“A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the
sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a risky and unfeeling
act to send it out into the world. How often it must be permanently impaired
by the eyes of the vulgar and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend
their affliction universally!” Mark Rothko (Tiger’s Eye, December 1947, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 44.)
Rokeya Sultana, or to give her full title Professor Rokeya Sultana, at the Department of Printmaking, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, Bangaldesh, is an artistic phenomenon, of that there can be no denial. From a Western perspective, Rokeya Sultana artwork’s have all the visual reminisces of Odilon Redon, the French Symbolist painter, as well as the strange beauty of Marc Chagall, the French Russian artist, and the early, spiritual works, of the Russian - Wassily Kandinsky. Rokeya Sultana intimates Kandinsky and has leanings towards the deliriousness of colour which exploded with ‘Fauvism’, and a decidedly French Symbolist aesthetic (the poetry of Baudelaire and music of Claude Debussy) informing her works.
That colour alone can manipulate our senses is not a modern phenomenon. Kandinsky, in ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ (Über das Geistige in der Kunst 1911 [Concerning the Spiritual in Art, English version 1914], writes…
“There occurs a purely physical effect, i.e., the eye itself is charmed by the beauty and other qualities of the colour. The spectator experiences a feeling of satisfaction, of pleasure, like a gourmet who has a tasty morsel in his mouth. Or the eye is titillated, as is one's palate by a highly spiced dish. It can also be calmed or cooled again, as one's finger can when it touches ice.”
Sultana presents a Western aesthetic albeit with distinctly Indian forms, gleaned from her stay (for her MA in Printmaking, 1983) at the renown Vishwa Bharati (communion of the world with Indian) University, in Shantiniketan, India, founded by Indian’s foremost creative -Rabindranath Tagore. Sultana shares her place in that alumni with Satyajit Ray, Amartya Sen and Indira Gandhi.
There is both light and darkness in Sultana’s works as she becomes closer to Kandinsky’s notions of a spirituality in art, with her own adventurous colouration, and freestyle line work.
Michael Sadleir (aka Michael Thomas Harvey Sadler or M. T. H. Sadler), in his father’s publication ‘Rhythm’ (1912) had written in his article ‘After Gauguin’ suggesting that ‘An art intent on expressing the inner soul of persons and things will inevitably stray from the outer conventions of form and colour. That is to say, it will be definitely unnaturalistic, anti-materialist.’ Many years later Sadleir, as M.T.H. Sadler, in his introduction to a fresh edition of ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ (1977), originally titled ‘The Art of Spiritual Harmony’, suggested that with the ‘Fauves’ Kandinsky ‘…saw the liberation of colour, and the artist spent the rest of the decade absorbing and incorporating the implications of this freedom in his art.’
With Sultana, we see this ‘freedom’ of art. She incorporates images of the lotus bud and flower, along with other figurative elements, aquatic denizens, orchids. In a comparatively recent work ‘An I for Buddha’ (2010) the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to the blue figure projected out of a background which is predominately red. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (in The Visible and the Invisible 1968, pp132) remarks that…
‘Claudel has a phrase saying that a certain blue of the sea is so blue that only blood would be more
red. The colour is yet a variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it,
with which it forms a constellation, or with other colours it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it.’
The Claudel here is the French poet Paul Claudel.
Alternatively Kandisnsky expresses…..
‘…red, as is seen by the mind and not by the eye, exercises at once a definite and an indefinite impression on the soul, and produces spiritual harmony. I say "indefinite," because in itself it has no suggestion of warmth or cold, such attributes having to be imagined for it afterwards, as modifications of the original "redness." I say "definite," because the spiritual harmony exists without any need for such subsequent attributes of warmth or cold.’ (pp28 Kandinsky)
In the title ‘An I for Buddha’ Sultana reminds us how fragile the ego is, how the blossoming lotus, finally freed from the mundanity of its mud, is quickly subsumed into the fierceness of desire if we let it.
Kandinsky also relates (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) that “…the colour red may cause a spiritual vibration like flame, since red is the colour of flame. A warm red has a stimulating effect and can increase in intensity until it induces a painful sensation, perhaps also because of its resemblance to flowing blood.”
In other of Sultana’s works we see intimations of the female form, swirling, standing, dancing, mothering. At times a female form suckles, goes about her daily chores, rides buses. Sultana revels her care for the female in the forms she presents. Yet other aspects arise. Buddhism, joyful, yet sometimes foreboding, intermingling of colour and form reach out from canvases and paper to the unsuspecting viewer of Rokeya Sultana artwork’s.
At times her work is wholly abstract, as in her ‘Earth Water Air’ series of colourations, with contrasts of colours - red, the colour of the Bangladesh flag blood of martyrs, counter balanced by the Bangladeshi flag’s green field, amidst a reflective sea of blue ( ‘Earth Water Air 3’). Colours speak for themselves, such as a swirling haze of yellow, orange and red graced by a hint of spiritual blue (‘Earth Water Air 4’). At other times there maybe hints of the figurative (‘Relation 12’), where figures ‘walk’ on serene blue anchoring the viewer’s eye amidst what is otherwise a wash of muted colours, from white to yellow.
I have quoted extensively from Wassily Kandinsky, and his writings, in “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, to draw parallels, or intimations, concerning Sultana’s use of colouration, and raised questions about its affect and effect, understanding and misunderstanding across our cultures.
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