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DAILY NEWS, Saturday, September 9, 2000

ART & ARTIST
By Shamim Akhter

An exhibition of 36 prints and four floor plans in blue print titled 'Home is a Foreign Place' by Zarina opened at Chawkandi Art on 5th Sept., 2000 to continue until further announcement.
  Zarina's woodcut prints for the bare eye are geometric and cosmic forms. Circles, squares, straight line, lines crossing each other and sprayed dots cover her boards. But for Robert Kimbral these wood block print casts are "both abstract and narrative set specifically in memory by recollection of words. No one can say how much allusive richness can be caught in such simple geometric forms." For Zarina her work means time, lots of hard work and creativity. As it is a crafted art, her work comes out of lot of processes, involving intensive labour. She comments, "When aesthetic problems are resolved. the work is there." For her work, she uses early mornings every day. Her four floor plans are also an expression of her concept. They are linear, woodblock print casts printed on extremely fine paper. Zarina said that she carved them from a city camp spread over the block. It took her year and a half to prepare her present show at Chawkandi Art.
  Her presentations are not very different from her person- simple and non-ornamental. Zarina studied science (Mathematics) while she wanted to be a painter. At the age of six she had decided that she would grow up as a painter, without knowing what it meant. And when she got the opportunity to study and practice art, she amalgamated her passion with her mathematical elements. Of course she was fond of geometry and also wanted to study architecture.
  Born and brought up in Algarh, Zarina received her education from Aligarh Muslim University. At that time, the University did not have a department of fine arts. Her father, Shaikh Abdul Rasheed was a Professor of History at Aligarh Muslim University. As a man of principle, he made it a point that his children studied at the same institution. Hence a private tutor was acquired to teach her drawing and painting at home. She completed her BSc. (Hons) in 1958. In the same year her marriage to a bureaucrat made her live in a home on wheels. She settled first in Bangkok (1958-61), returned to Delhi (1961-1963), moved to Paris (1963-1967). From 1968 onwards she spent six years in Delhi. In 1974 she moved to Tokyo and then to Los Angeles (1975-76). The year 1976 took her to New York where she has been living until now. A glimpse of her life style gives a better understanding of her thematic woodblock cast prints.
  Recalling her early days of painting, Zarina said that she would paint landscape and models. Her visual experiences were limited to paintings only. It was in Bangkok that she saw prints. There she hooked a teacher to learn the art of printmaking. She started making