Rabia Yaseen

"My paintings are something like a kaafi of mystic poetry that contains versatile metaphors. I as seeker am impelled to show my longing for Divine love through visual transformation with reference to Punjabi Mystic poetry of Bulleh Shah. His narrated ecstatic textual metaphors are interwoven with personal experiences concerning self-realization and awakening. I have dedicated my artistic endeavors to the rendering of the ritualistic and mystical elements in a metaphoric manner.

My fondness towards Sufi milieu of Punjab as artist set free a rebellion of musical strokes in calligraphic patterns and under the spell of this charisma I rendered the experience in imagery where lines lead wherever they may in melodious movement in fluent mix media on canvases. The expressionistic yet simplified nature is deliberately incorporated with distinctive colors like black, red, white, green and yellow of Sufis. I experienced a transformation and my line loosely interlaced loops whirling around indigenous metaphors like of bangles, knotted threads, jails, charagh and tied rose’s strings associated with folk culture and mysticism. What we have to remember in this modern era is that every fiber in our being is unity towards Divine love.

The embodiment of these metaphors under conceptual and contextual connotation is also a depiction of ‘bridal symbolism’ that makes my soul sada suhagan. It is the celestial and terrestrial secret that is encouraging my motivation to personify them in ‘visual meditation’. I realized through sustained personal emotions that when we leave the entire visual and conceptual framework behind only then we actually begin to see our inner self and blessed soul. So I rejected preconceived notions of reality and abstractions and only adhered to the symphony of my own sensation of realization."