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The artist in her studio 
[[Image]]       4

Zarina: "You can't keep looking back."

by HARJI MALIK

A CONTINUOUS repetition of horizontal lines in varying thicknesses, in tones of brown-black form a vast landscape of light and shadow; heavy vertical bands compress into a cage; the swirls of a tree stump become an obsessive vortex. These are Zarina's graphics, simple to the point of austerity, evocative, sometimes disturbing. 

"No, I don't think I will ever go back to painting, to colour" she replied to my question. We sat on two "moorahs" drinking tea one afternoon. "You can never go back to things. You must go ahead. Everything leads on. My old Professor at Aligarh always used to say 'If God had wanted you to look backwards, he would have put eyes in the back of your head!'" This seems to be part of Zarina's philosophy in life, as well as in art, and she does not talk easily about the past. 

Although she never went to formal art school, she started using oils and canvas when she was a teenager of fifteen. At University, she studied Mathematics, and this seems to have exerted a strong influence on her work which has a pronounced sense of precision and detail. Her introduction to graphics came in Bangkok, where for three years she studied woodcuts at the Academy of Fine Arts. 

romantic picture of the artist in his garret. 

"Of course Western education has had a great influence on many of us, and often we known more of the West's artistic traditions than we do of our own. But I am very optimistic about the art scene. There are artists who are doing fine work. Don't forget that the Indian artist is trying to make up for so much lost time, that we have just started to do so, and are still far behind. Even in the West artists haven't caught up with the technological processes of today. Here we are trying to keep pace with them when actually we are still a rural society. 

Meaning of symbols

"Even paint and canvas are a revolution to us. We've been handling oil paints only for the past fifty years, if that, and in Europe they started somewhere around the 13th century, didn't they? For us it is still a new medium."  "What about graphics?" I asked. "We have no tradition in graphics at all" Zarina explained. "My theory is that in Europe graphics became popular because cheap prints of the Holy Trinity were made, so that even the poorest person could possess one. In India everyone had their small personal deity in clay or metal or stone, so graphics never became popular, as did woodcuts in Japan."