Page 373 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

370 ART AND CRAFTS

left Birbhum of his childhood and Kolkata of his early youth almost forever. At that
time various experiments were going on in different media of art, like poetry, short
stories and novels in Dhaka. The young generation was trying to leave behind old
sensibilities, old languages in a new country as new citizens. It was not simply a whim
of discarding the old just because it was old. They did have something new to say, they
were inspired, moved by new sensations. Kibria and his contemporary artists - the
second generation of artists in this country after Zainul, Quamrul, Safiuddin and
Sultan represented the youthful sensibilities of the fifties in fine arts. They nourished
the taste and mental state of the city. Simplicity had faded away from the forms of their
art works, in some of their works the village that they had left behind became an image
of nostalgia. Their simplified figures and distorted perspective inspired the viewers to
think about life and nature from a different angle, and some of their paintings became
the existential geometry of urban alienation, loneliness and boredom. Along with
these, the negative attitude of conservative society about figurative art also worked as
a catalyst. It is an established fact that the more the power machinery becomes
irascible the more art becomes introspective. The time when Kibria made a beginning
as an artist was like this. His mind was filled with loneliness, insecurity and a wall of
silence. On the other hand, there was the rhythm of a new age in a new city. At that
time, in the fifties, Kibria had painted Dance in the graveyard or A horse in moonlight-
surrealistic paintings of a depressed, scared, silent mind. Sad blue and blackish red had
become the signs of cold deathliness in these paintings. Falling figures have joined in
these works adding a sense of experience of the edge of an endless pit in a nightmare.
On the other hand, he had expressed subdued romanticism, and arranged happiness
and music without exuberance in paintings like Water sport (fig.9.9) and Full moon.
fig. 9.9 Composition: The forms of these painting are inspired from Cubism. But the originality of these
Black, lithograph, 1960
works lies in the fact that these paintings comprise subtle cubic lines fading in
geometry-less brushing of colors within the horizontal sensitive compositions rather
than the strong geometry of cubes. We have talked about The
horse in moonlight; we can also talk about Three souls - the
painting which brought him the national award in painting for
the second time. These paintings are not ordinary depictions of
three-dimensional geometry, but we should say that Kibria’s
own discourse began with these works. The discourse includes
dialogue on the surface and beyond it, feelings versus skills,
intellectual urbanity versus Vaishnava detachment. These works
clearly foretell the sign that Kibria would concentrate in the
inspection of the mind in his artwork.
Kibria entered the second phase of his artistic life ending the first
phase at the end of the fifties. This phase added the chapters of
texture and space related issues in his works. He went to Japan in
1959 to seek higher learning in oil painting and printmaking. He
got himself trained in oil painting in the first two years and in the
third year he learned woodcut, etching and lithograph. His