Page 336 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

FIRST GENERATION ARTIST 333

through her singing and dancing she makes Laxminder return to life. The other
name of water is life.
It is through death that generations of men achieve rebirth. Life originates from water.
These pictures by Safiuddin each create a text, the reading of which takes us in
different directions. In his works of this period the shape of the boat shows itself in
curved rhythms of the two opposites of the convex-concave. This shape of the boat
constructed from the convex-concave shows itself in his pictures of a later period as
the symbol of the eye and as the symbol of the fish. The boat, the eye and fish are the
combination of the formally opposed convex-concave and also the formally
transformed shape of each other. This barley corn form has been called “mandorla” in
Italian. This mandorla can be seen in pre-renaissance pictures and reliefs as a halo
around the form of Jesus Christ. This halo-like mandorla is a sacred symbol. In
Safiuddin’s pictures the mandorla-like convex-concave form however hasn’t come
with any religious connotations – it has appeared from the structure of the boat-eye-
fish, through a natural process. He did not get this form from outside; he got this form
from direct experience. What first appeared in his pictures in the forms of the boat and
fish, in the context of the Language Movement and the Liberation Movement this
image became the eye. It is a sensitive eye.
In Safiuddin’s pictures of subsequent periods we observe him ascending towards new
developments. The continuous curved rhythm that can be seen in his engraving Towing
Rope done in 1958 (fig. 8.23), the same rhythmic pattern can be noticed in a different
variation in The Language Movement of 1987 and In Memory of ’71 of 1988. It is as if
the lines of the picture Towing Rope has captured the mood of the rain and storm of
Bangladesh. The calmness of daily living that can be seen in the pictures of Radha
Banga and Jharkhand, is the very opposite of the use of lines in Towing Rope. Similarly
in the pictures The Language Movement and In Memory of ’71 we see the form of the
eye and the rhythm of innumerable semi-circular convex-concave forms (pl. 3.1). In
the picture The Language Movement the viewer can at his right see the hint of a face.
In both the pictures the eye is the symbol of wakefulness, consciousness and sensation.
Particularly the print named In Memory of ’71 is dominated by teardrops. Both the
prints are in monochrome. The colorlessness of memory and pain has been expressed
by this. Pain is devoid of color. For this reason these two prints display no colors.
In Safiuddin’s oil paintings we also notice the diversity of his style. It was already
observed in A Book Stall in Paris, how he organized visual information into pictorial
composition. In the Lemonade Stand-2 of 1988 the vertical movement in the colored
bottles of sherbet and the horizontal movement in the slats of the wooden floor of the
shop have created the repetition of opposing movements. This opposing movement
has been strengthened by the vertically opposite use of red and green colors. Also, in
the picture The Sun, Tree and Girl of 1989 it is the vertical movement of the tree and
the standing woman that has found expression on the canvas (pl. 8.18). The two
colors, green and blue, have appeared with symbolic meaning in the picture. The
figurative expression of ever green life, youth and fertility has been captured in these
colors with the calmness of blue. In between the two, the warm touch of the color