Page 337 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

334 ART AND CRAFTS

purple has also created a contrast. Red
and Green of 1994, Fish and Net of
1996, Blue Water, The Sound of Blue-1
of 2000, and The Melody of Nature-2
of 2001 point to just this inevitable
movement taking him forwards, the
upward climb to a newer stage which
perhaps the artist necessarily has to
reach. The higher level where the
context and the subject begin to fall
away, loose, unrequired elements fall
off and decrease withering away and in
the end it is just the essence of
experience which becomes the
composition of abstract forms and
colors spread out on the canvas.
Rabindranath had said something like
this about his songs, that all inspiration
looked towards the distant. It cannot be
foretold where the song may go in the
fig. 8.23 Towing Rope, end, after it is born from an insignificant incident. When the song finds its full form
engraving, 1958 its context becomes secondary in importance. As in Safiuddin’s The Melody of Nature-
1 the forest and the illuminated sky cannot be identified separately. They can be seen
as an independent design or composition of balanced colors and shapes. The
inspiration of the picture Sound of Blue-1 is flood water, and the flow of various life
forms spread in layers on and inside the water. But when the artist executed this
picture based on that experience, it did not become mere information or reporting – it
became an independent picture free of its ties with the context and the obligation to
preserve resemblance. At the level which the picture finally reaches, the question of
judging it by checking it against its inspiration does not arise. That restless life in the
flood water was agitated, always changing water from that particular had receded long
ago. His house in Swamibag had been flooded again. Sitting on the floating bed in his
house it seemed to him that he was afloat on Noah’s ark. The whole of life was just
this going and coming back, and again and again at the end of the flood the
rediscovery of the touch of land. But in a picture a feeling, an experience, a sensation
of seeing something in particular, stands still on the ground of eternity. Nature changes
with the passage of every smallest of moments, but a picture keeps a particular block
of time unmoving and still for eternity, a particular experience of an individual. Nature
is ever changing, a picture is still. But the thoughts of an artist are not unchanging. The
artist’s mind never remains stationary or at rest at any point. After finishing a picture,
in the next picture the artist crosses the previous moment just like taking another
footstep. So, although in the picture each moment stands still for eternity, the artist