Viewing page 47 of 117

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

In a much-quoted piece of advice, as relevant today as it was in the nineteenth century, Edouard Manet once told a younger painter: "Conciseness in art is a necessity and a grace. Cultivate your memory, for nature will never give you more than information. No set pieces. Please, no set pieces." Nothing is known of the future course charted by Manet's colleague or if he ever heeded the elder artist's counsel. But one contemporary artist appears to have taken Manet's words as something of a mantra.
At a time when most artists are incapable of touching a pictorial sensation without tarting it up to the point where the eye wants to cry uncle, the Indian-born artist Zarina Hashmi's terse pictorial syntax is hinged on the matter-of-fact rigours of geometry. She uses
EXTREME
[[image]]
EXPRESSIVENESS
By Saquib Hanif
Despite her famous brevity, Zarina Hashmi can speak volumes without as much as a hint of garrulity

[[right margin]]The Herald, August 2004 103 Arif Mahmood[[/right margin]]