Page 384 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

SECOND GENERATION ARTISTS 381

bears out the artist’s sense of isolation. Aminul
wanted to capture the universal form of time.
In collage and other mixed media works, he
attached to the surface images of wars and
conflicts created by humans and then used
colors to add a painterly moderation so that
one can also go beyond the limits of time. His
paintings titled Time and Beyond testify to his
dialectical ideas (fig. 9.18).
To Aminul, the study of art is like a mirror for
self-analysis. Using oil paint and pieces of
glass, he created geometric shapes to paint his
self-portrait. Sometimes he painted parts of his
body; or brought to the mirror reflections of
his own figure or of some event in time. Here
again he confronts time with a dialectical
formula. He wants to gauge the endless state
of his existence. Thus, he names his painting
In Search of Self-portrait (fig. 9.19).
Aminul never wavered from the truth that
painting means light in opposition to darkness.
He is still illustrating this truth with a variety of
compositions in his creative drawings. These designs sometimes relate to some aspect fig. 9.19 In Search of
of man or nature, sometimes they are stopped in a state where it seems the forms are Self-portrait, oil and
still evolving on the surface of the paper. Through these transformable motifs, Aminul mirror collage, 1982
speaks of the prospect of lines growing into pictures. The artist’s eternal belief in the
transformative nature of objects still shows in his works (fig. 1.23).
Through a re-examination of the language of folk art, a dimension of novelty was
added in 1953 in the study of modern art in Bangladesh. Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin
was the pioneer of this enquiry. Experimentation in the field of art of this country
gained a new momentum in the 1950s. A few painters and a sculptor, who had studied
in Europe, brought about this change. Aminul Islam’s soliloquy regarding this is note-
worthy, ‘The first residence of three young Bengali artists – Hamidur Rahman,
Novera Ahmed and myself – in Florence, the center of the European Renaissance, and
coincidentally not far from the home of Dante, the great poet of world literature,
without doubt created a special significance in our lives. Our brief stay together gave
birth to many discussions on the most complex theories - through our original
thoughts and perceptions of art and subtle and diverse questions on national and
international ideas. This process was further enriched through our experience in
Europe over the next three years. After we returned to the country in the middle of
1956, within one or two months of each other, the revolutionary demonstration of the
painting style of Hamid and myself in October and November, and later of Novera’s