Page 48 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

PAINTING 45

media. However, he gains his key distinctiveness as an artist in the tapestry medium,
and to date, he is the only example to have used this medium creatively in this country.
Rashid Choudhury is positioned at the opposite pole from the contemporary artists
returning from overseas. Western training has almost irrespectively inspired the artists
of the fifties to merge with the international trend of art through practicing abstraction.
Although Rashid Choudhury accepted the abstract composition of the pictorial plane
from his western training, he has returned to Bengal’s folk traditions as its source.
However, his search for tradition has not followed the way of the dolls, pata or crafts
of Bengal, rather it has come from the source of the form of idols and of fairy tales,
folk tales, punthis, and panchalis (fig. 1.25). With this he has tried to combine
composition of colors from folk art and the two-dimensional composition,
manifestation of light and shade and artistic skills obtained from western education. In
his early days as an artist, Rashid Choudhury was deeply influenced by Mark
Chagall’s style of art and this has had a significant effect in the formulation of his
artistic consciousness. Even in the early stages he gradually cut off directness and
began to move in imagination and dreams. Like Chagall, the houses, men, animals,
trees in his paintings began to acquire a floating appearance and childhood filled with
memories of fairy tales and stories continuously haunted his subject matter. Western
training made him aware of the form of the picture plane; of balancing of the
interaction among points, lines, scratches etc. with intelligence within the two-
dimensional confines of the pictorial surface; and of the technique of analyzing forms fig. 1.25 Rashid
and motifs. His painting has also been affected by his practice in the tapestry medium. Choudhury,
The subject matter of tapestry appears through fragments of shape created by the Shyamangini, oil, 1985
intersection of vertical and horizontal threads, a characteristic
that can be observed in his paintings. Nevertheless, it is in the
tapestry medium where Rashid Choudhury has left the mark of
his distinctiveness. Although he achieved a complete idea and
knowledge of this medium during his stay in the west, he has
infused indigenous uniqueness in its application– in the use of
indigenous materials as with the technique of color composition
and creation of designs. Indigenous forms in two-dimensional
context are displayed on the surface of his tapestries in fragments
and in a glow of light. Here, the ancient and eternal nature of
Bengal appears in an indistinct world of men, plants and animals.
Rashid Choudhury’s accomplishment in building a way of
modern art through combining the western and eastern approach
to art is worth mentioning.
One of the major divergent and perceptive artists of the fifties is
Murtaja Baseer. Within him was also the temperament to go
beyond conventions, the urge to express the self through various
media and through the practice of different styles of art. Thus