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Poetry : Pure and Simple As a painter and printmaker of outstanding merit, Rokeya Sultana has ingrained in her vision and sensibility a fine lyrical resonance of all she has lived and experienced, reminiscent of the famed Bengali poet, Jibanananda Das, on the banks of the Dhansiri river. The river Dhansiri, real or imagined, that ripples through its lush green banks under the blue sky mirrored in its sparkling waters, is in essence a cherished image that fleshes out the lyrics we carry in our soul, of life and nature in Bengal’s countryside. Not that Rokeya’s splendid gouaches and mixed medias are inspired by the poetry of Jibanananda, they may recall any major poet of Bengal, even Tagore himself, steeped as they are in the ineffability of the deeply stirred sensations of nature’s music, smell and gentle colours. The point is, Rokeya’s paintings are densely redolent of the qualities of one’s favourite poetry. Here is an instance of painting’s power to illuminate poetry or here is poetry pure and simple written in an idiom that treats “moods, music and moonlight as one.” In an earlier series Rokeya‘s passionate quest was the pictorial essence of our elemental environs. There she had handled most powerfully an expressionist vocabulary to build a fluidly structured painterly surface charged with a sensitive palette of fine tonal harmony. The current suite has a genetic affinity with the earlier series, titled Water, Air and Earth, but here her colour-specific painterly abstractions spring a surprise or two of sharp notes of specific emotions and a rare crispness in technical execution . In some of her canvases, washes in gentle and sensitive shades of blue, pink or of warm yellow and orange, sprawl and spread like rolling surf on the sea, creating placid areas and pools of colour in a splendid orchestration of tones and values in contrast or harmony. Colour-fields in varied tones or in marine and cobalt blue throw up in fluid relief forms and shapes like floating clouds in the autumn sky. In others, yellows greens blues in fine-graded, striated and granular washes create a crisp motley surface that suggests configurations of earth and water seen from an aerial viewpoint. Nature’s shapes and forms, even figurative elements that we can spot in them , lift our aesthetic experience of the imagery from the level of abstraction to that of the real. The artist brings to bear upon her canvases a totality of her vision in which her nature-soaked perception of life acquires richly complex textures and tones from her deeply felt personal and private moods and meanings, passions and emotions. Etched on abstract nature-scapes are often figures of myths and metaphors, mostly female nudes of rhythmic sensuous curves, in free and flowing lines, gliding gently on the surface. In other frames the figures and forms enact the myth of love and passion, like that of Leda and the swan, exuding a tender sense of tension between the figurative and the abstract and suggestive of both nature as the eternally feminine and as the source of all the stimuli of the artist’s imaginative life.
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