A little self-admiration

Maria Khan's new series titled "Vanity is Stronger than Love at Sixteen" at Canvas Gallery, Karachi unveiled a little strange portraits of elderly men and women with large eyes, wide shoulders, strong necks, bulky bodies and enhanced features having a dreamy ambiance. These characters were then embellished with flowers, berries and fruits as if they were in a mystic garden dressed in printed fabric gazing upwards or towards the viewers.
The fictitious and exaggerated details add interest to her paintings. Mostly figures were painted against dark starry background meaning at night under the sky - a time when the world fall a sleep but our desires still strong and awake.
The paintings were in black and white with a hint of red on the clothes of both men and women showing their desire to look beautiful and their facial expressions showed that they were self-admiring. The artist wanted to convey that it is everybody's right to feel and look beautiful at any age and at any time in life.
Mainly Maria's figurative paintings portrayed woman's suppressed lives in our society. She talked about the right of women living with their own conscience and not being dictated by the society how to live a life. Women often live according to the desires of their men family members. They may like it or not they were forced to live an abnormal life and hence they started to believe their life as a burden. Thus she depicted female figures as they wanted to be not as the society wanted them to be.
An MA (Honors) from the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore and a faculty member of the Punjab University, Maria is always on the lookout for characters that inspire her. "The process is a journey of discovery; partly of self. These visuals are in our head, all of us have locked them away far from the eyes of the public. Unlike us these figures are comfortable in their skins and emotions regardless of the norms of the society they live in and very much like us they aspire for more - love, beauty, power and the stars. Inspired from the works of Botticelli, Manet and Paula Rego, my work is an expression of stories and secrets that I carry within," she said in a statement.
In the present body of work she focused on the women who face strange behaviour of people around them because of their bodies as they are fat and bulgy and as the time passed by they became old this unfair treatment just stick to their minds and they may become depressed but Maria wanted them to find beauty in themselves and accept as they are and also urged others to accept them. Because each and every person may it be woman or man have their own personality and character judging anyone because of their appearance is unfair and biased pushing innocent people in dilemma.
Realizing the situation she put forward the idea of beauty in every person no matter how he/she look a person must be beautiful inside. Physical attraction is not the whole world beauty lies in a person's character and it has no age. Particularly people became more beautiful in an old age because they have gained wisdom, profundity of thought, depth of mind and lifelong experience that enlightened their personalities. Hence they don't need any other beauty enhancers. They are as beautiful as they can be in their wrinkled faces and bulgy bodies. So let them celebrate their lives at this time of life and let them full of personal vanity.