Think about the last time a song really got to you, maybe a Baul song you heard late at night that left a heavy feeling in your chest you couldn’t quite explain, or a Nazrul Geeti whose beat lifted you right up, and I am sure most of us can also remember getting lost inside a Tagore poem or a novel we didn’t want to finish.
Now think about the last time you stood in front of a painting, say one of Zainul Abedin’s famine sketches with those thin, starving bodies or one of S M Sultan’s strong and dream-like farmers, and ask yourself honestly what you felt.
For a lot of us, I think the answer is not much, just a kind of distance.
I believe this gap comes from the way we are brought up, as from our first day in school we are taught to read words and make sense of them, and in all those years hardly anyone sits us down to show us that a picture can be read too.
Literature works through language, so people can walk into the world of a story or a poem using words they already know, though to be fair a lot of it still goes over the head of the common reader. But literature at least has a place in our classrooms; it is part of the syllabus and it has had some support and care from society, more or less.
Painting is different as it works through the eye and does not hand us a clear meaning in plain words, so for ordinary people in our country it is not an easy thing to get into, and the support it gets from our society is very small too.
We grew up hearing about Zainul Abedin and how great he was, his best-known works keep showing up in our exam questions and his images are even printed on our money, which tells you how famous he is.
Yet has anyone ever actually stopped to tell us what makes those paintings so powerful, what it is exactly that makes them good?
And what about Sultan, his farmers with their huge god-like bodies, the round gatherings of farmers and cattle, all those hard-working people painted so big and grand, living together with their land and their animals almost like one family.
Why do their faces look so divine? What are they trying to tell us, and what is the painting making us feel? I honestly wonder whether anyone is even talking about this.
When Sultan’s birth anniversary comes around, our job seems to end with an article about his life in the newspaper (and I am aware this is a newspaper page too), and knowing about an artist’s life does matter, but when it comes to sitting with the paintings themselves and looking closely at what they do we go almost completely quiet.
Part of the problem I think is that we want a painting to give us its message straight away like a headline does, and its power actually works in a much quieter and deeper way that takes time.
A painting is more than a decoration for the wall or a hobby for rich people, I like to think of it as a piece of glass that light passes through and comes out the other side in many colours, so when we look at it properly it opens up many meanings, feelings and ideas, and in its own silent way it plays a big part in shaping who we are as a society.
So, if we want to understand what a painting is saying, maybe we should start with a simple question.
We can ask of any kind of art, a song, a poem, a novel or a painting, which is what does it make us feel, and what kind of experience does it give us that wakes up our sense of beauty and our emotions?
Take a song, the feeling it wakes up in us is tied to the seven basic notes, the way they sit with one another to make a tune, and the beat, then the words come pouring out on top of that same tune. In a poem it is mostly about how the language is used along with the rhythm, to tell us about something that happened or some idea about life.
A novel has room to describe events in detail, so we live through the exciting moments of a character’s life, we see where their choices lead them and we come away a bit wiser from the story.
If you look at all of these together you will notice that each one is a piece of real life mixed in with the artist’s own way of thinking.
A painting works the same way. The artist picks out small broken pieces from real events and puts them together into one whole and this full experience, made of what happened and what the artist thought about it. Slowly arrives at some kind of end point which becomes the artist’s purpose, the reason the painting exists in the first place.
Then the artist fills it with colour, line and space to make a picture, a world where everything the artist saw and felt can live, and if we as viewers manage to step inside that world we can walk around in it with our own understanding, and the longer we stay and think, the more of a story it starts telling us.
It is this purpose of the artist that makes real life look so different from one painting to the next, and this is also what separates a painting from a photograph.
A photograph gives us a copy of an ordinary scene, but if several artists painted that same scene, each of them would show it in their own way as each one is painting it for a different reason.
Making art also has a real, physical side to it beyond imagination and deep thinking, which is skill in particular methods, the craft, and the finish that give a painting its own colour and shape.
A good painting needs two things that the artist has worked on for years: the ability to see beneath the outside look of things, and the beauty of the craft itself, and the artist gives the picture its shape by keeping these two in balance; as if one of them is missing, then the real thought behind the painting never fully comes through.
What I want to do with this writing is to understand why this distance between us and paintings exists, who is to blame for it and gain some basic insight into painting itself: how it's done and how it's delivering meaning.
I think we need to see how our education system, with all its gaps, and the fact that art so rarely reaches ordinary people, have together pushed painting away from the common person.
We also need to understand that a painting can wake a society up just as strongly as a song or a poem can and get people thinking for themselves. And lastly, we need someone to walk us through the basics of a painting, how it is put together, and how an artist thinks so that we can enter that world properly and slowly build our own way of judging what we see.
So, the next time you come across a painting, in a gallery, or even on a page of an old-school textbook, I would ask you to stay with it a little longer than usual and ask it what it is trying to make you feel. You might be surprised by how much it has been waiting to say.
Sharif Al Zubayer Zishan is an aspiring writer and journalist.