“I can draw a flower, give it colours and make it as realistic as possible with minuscule details but what if I fancy bringing the fragrance or the sensation of touching the beauty in canvas; what is there to do for me as a painter?” Mahmudul Haque, the veteran artist threw me the question during a casual conversation recently.
“Is there anything one can do? Can anybody draw ‘something’ that can provide food for five senses?” I replied. “Yes, we can”, uttered Haque, a gregarious middle aged artist with a keen sense of humour, “That is what we, the practitioner of abstract art, at least likely to believe in.”
He said that after the invention of photography, painters moved forward from ‘Photo Realism’ and started exploring their visions by experimenting reality in different ways. “Thus landscape, portrait and figurative art practitioners came to the verge of a new perspective to see things through abstraction,” he said
No kidding, abstract art is not a layman’s cup of tea and Mahmudul Haque knows it.
“I am not looking for art critics to appreciate my works, not that I don’t want them to.” But what Haque wants is for a normal person to stay in front of his paintings and realize -- “Ok, it has something, something beyond the cognition of visual senses.”
“If that happens,” said the artist, “I would term my effort as successful.”
Success however has long been part of Haque’s career. Very few contemporary artists of Bangladesh have credentials of having 39 solo exhibitions in eight countries and over 40 joint exhibitions in 15 more.
The principal exclusivity of Haque’s abstractions is his very deliberate and individual character of spatial arrangements. His paintings have some quality of compositional distinctiveness that indicates the artist’s personality.
“That is something which has grown within me inherently through years of teaching experience,” said Haque, a former faculty of Institute of Fine Arts of Dhaka University who also taught fine arts in five other universities home and abroad.
“An artist should have made some mark in his painting, so that one can instantly recognise whose work it is,” he told the Weekend Tribune, “My marks are my choice of colours; the combination of unlikely two or three shades of colours which ultimately create pleasure for the eyes, even for those eyes that have zero appreciation for abstract arts.”
Haque, whose name is already written in the country’s fine arts history as a printmaking maestro, has long been an advocate of the country’s nascent contemporary abstract art genre. Did he succeed in that?
“The viewers will be better able to tell but I can say that I try to carve a space out of colour in the canvas and that surely gives a viewer a breath of freshness rather than a sense of choking,” he quipped.
“In truth, I actually don’t discriminate between figurative and abstract style of painting. I just follow my instinct, taking the lead of my brush,” he confided to the Weekend Tribune.
He also confessed that his printmaking skills have given him an edge to do experiment with abstraction. “Yes, its true, I frequently use my printmaking expertise through an extinct technique called ‘Mezzotint’ (a form of etching and engraving) while painting an abstraction, even when I am doing so in oil or acrylic medium,” he said.
His recent works exhibited those features. The texture and forms in many of the works in the exhibition are not by and large smooth and well defined but rather corrugated and are normally done in heavy impasto.
Almost all of his paintings however displayed a keen sense of technical perfection as well as the spatial discipline. “You find that perfection and discipline in my work as I am deeply influenced by the Japanese perception of space. Years of learning techniques and printmaking in Japan has instilled that in me,” he said.
