Artist's homage to poetry through wisdom of birds and animals

New Delhi, May 20 (UNI) An exhibition of Calligraphic paintings, a beautiful synthesis of art and poetry, by internationally acclaimed artist Dr Ameena Ahmad Ahuja is on display at the Jamia Archives Gallery here.

Calligraphic paintings are inspired from calligraphy, an art of decorative writing of a script, usually cursive, although sometimes angular, produced chiefly by brush.

The paintings exhibit Dr Ameena's way of blending a unique oriental sensibility with highly stylized western training as she learnt and worked at various western art schools.

The artist has chosen forms of animals and birds to reveal an amazing combination of 'art and verse' in her exotic calligraphies.

Her colours truly sing couplets and her phrases imbue soothing colours to the mind.

The forms of these and animals and birds display intimate human emotions which are bound to grab the attention.

She has prominently used the poetry of the great masters of Urdu, such as Ghalib and Iqbal, the Sufi masters Attar and Rumi,and the great Persian poets Hafiz and Saadi.

Dr Ameena learnt a range of calligraphic styles such as Kufic, Nastaliq, Shikast and Cyrillic, which were incorporated in the calligraphic forms of animals and birds with her marvelous learning of poetry.

The couplets and verses of her favourite poets were converted into universal forms through colourful and sometimes characteristic strokes of black and white. Her childhood learning of using reed pens of varied thickness still accompanies her as she uses special pens in her paintings which give them a distinct accent.

The artist seems preoccupied with black and white as she finds their varied gradations and shades very intimate as reflected in most of her works. She distinguishes her paintings with touches of bronze, silver and gold to accentuate her Khate-Rehani.

She uses varied elements such as Indian ink, Suni ink, Handmade papers from India, rice paper from Japan, and papers from Sanganer to make her calligraphic paintings effective.

Her versatality draws on sources as diverse as the classical poetry of the East- in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and poems by the great Russian writers as Pushkin, Tiutshev and Akhmatova.

The artist has donated 33 paintings, all black and white calligraphies of ink on paper to the Jamia Millia Islamia.

The exhibition will be on display till May 23. It is a tribute to the artist's sister, Late Sameena Ahmad. Her works have been exhibited widely in Moscow, Tokyo, Venezuela, Columbia, New York and India.

Dr Ameena Ahuja has taught Russian at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and lectured on poetry at Columbia University and worked as Artist in Residence at Harvard.

UNI