Page 394 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

SECOND GENERATION ARTISTS 391

He had become inspired to return to tradition for the enrichment of his art. At a mature
age, he said about his philosophy of art, ‘...rooted in tradition... the tradition of the
middle ages, of the day of magic of griffons and unicorns! And the fields and the
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firmaments!’ Lurcat created the images of wild animals and nature in his tapestries.
The symbolic and legendary animals like bull, cock, butterfly and birds of the middle
ages repeatedly found a place in his tapestries.
The artistic thought and subject of Lurcat had inspired Rashid Choudhury very much
and he had become interested to find his own tradition. He was able to express himself
fully after discovering the subject that he had been searching for for so long. He
became interested in the medium on the one hand and on the other, he started to depict
his own country and his tradition in his works. From this time onwards, he started to
develop his own character.
From the very beginning, the naming of his works was subject oriented. Before 1958, the
names were Collecting Shells, Boat, Portrait, Sitting Woman, Three Women. Later on
names like Nabanna, Farmer Couple, Radha-Krishna, Couple, Eve, Adam, Festival,
Dancing, Shyama, Mother, Face of Bengal etc. were repeated time and again. The
objects of folk art and the characters of folk life of Bengal became the subjects of his
works. He said, ‘I have chosen a very small space for my works. I want to grow from
here. I want to strike at the deep root of the mystery of life. I want to take my sensibilities
into a larger plane. Just think about the small seed of a banyan tree. How full of life it
must be to give birth to such an enormous tree. Yes, I the artist Rashid Choudhury paint
pictures, but one has to see if my identity is there, if I belong to my society, if my
language comprises of my identity. My artistic self belongs to that place, in that seed fig. 9.26 Festival-3,
which includes icons like elephant, snake, Srikrishna or Kali.’ 46 [Trans.] gouache, 1981
He also said that the love that came out of
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nature always made him restive. He had seen
the thirst for love in the relationship of Radha-
Krishna, the snake gave him the imagery of
fierce love while he could imagine a bashful
love through the metaphor of the elephant. He
entered into his memory and the folk culture of
Bengal using his very strongly romantic
imagination and dreaminess and he searched
for the original form of Bengali folk perception
that had been flowing through the collective
subconscious of the people of this land. On the
other hand, he looked into the associations of
everyday life in search of signs and symbols to
create the visual totem of the Bengali nation.