Page 396 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

SECOND GENERATION ARTISTS 393

(watercolor, 1980), Dark Woman (oil on canvas, 1985), Dark Woman (oil on canvas,
1985)(fig. 1.25), Flower (watercolor, 1985) look like strongly growing plants. In
many of his works we get the feeling of such plants or the atmosphere created by the
play of light and shade within bushes or thickets of trees. There is a definite rhythm
in the development of his works. They create a sense of movement, sometimes a
circular, dancing colorfulness (fig. 9.26).
While Lurcat had tried to gather strength from tradition, Rashid Choudhury tried to
discover his identity in the elements and arrangements of tradition. This variation
of the way of looking for inspiration from tradition moved their works in two
different directions.
The division of space on Rashid Choudhury’s canvas is not like that of the folk-art of
Bengal. His composition is western in style. This comes along with the traditional
images of deities – Durga with ten hands, the posture of Radha Krishna, raised hand
of Kali, which in most cases have taken the shapes of arches on the upper portion of
the picture. In many of his pictures, we find the form of an arch on the upper part and
a separate space on the bottom, which looks like a base. It seems that the subject is
standing on a base. For example, in the tapestries titled Adam (1979, 1981, 1982) (fig.
9.28) and Eve (1980), the subjects were developed as one single form. They were fig. 9.28 Adam-2,
presented somewhat like sculptures. tapestry, 1979
We can also find similarity of his compositions with the
compositions of sara painting (clay pot cover painting)
where the main subject is placed in the middle and the
associated matter spread in all directions. He did some
works on saras in the gouache medium. He also did
some tapestry in the round form of the sara. He has
successfully presented the convex, round form of a sara
in two of his tapestries, namely, Festival-1 (1975) and
Peasant Woman-2 (1979) (fig. 9.27).
As a mature artist, Rashid Choudhury became more
spontaneous in gouache, watercolor and, above all, in
tapestry rather than oil color. In the eighties, artist
Nisar Hossain (Professor, Institute of Fine Art, Dhaka
University) worked with him. He says, rather than
using oil color from the beginning he used to work with
powder color and then put a coating of oil color
afterwards. Perhaps he tried to save the time that oil
painting takes. 50 He did some terracotta. The subjects
were the same. For example, he did Universal in 1984.
Here figures of the man and woman were presented in
the middle. The man had a crown on the head. Perhaps
it is the image of Krishna or Mahadeva. Under the