From critique to creator

Abstract artist Saba Hasan feels content to have discovered her "language" with experimentations.

Travelling around the globe, being a critical viewer of art, seeing and studying it first hand, artist Saba Hasan reasons on the advantages to her entering late to full-time painting. "You know what you want to be and the learning has already been done, giving one the confidence that emanates from one's experience."

She agreed to follow the norms of a conventional profession but, "I was always a painter and the angst for art never goes," and in 1993 Saba decided to exchange roles "" from critique to be judged upon.

Over the years, having dabbled with oils and charcoal, Saba's experimentation with mixed media has had her create compositions with paper pulp, plaster, rusted nails, soot, jute and burnt Urdu text "" each ordinary medium abstractly relating itself to strong emotions.

The mediums, she tells us, stumbled upon her as her studio in Delhi is neighboured by a carpenter, welder and blacksmith, letting Saba pick and discard various mediums, exploring and experimenting till she found peace with what inspired her.

"Even ordinary things in life can evoke beauty and strong statements," says Saba. Her latest 36 works in mixed media titled 'The Book Of Disquiet' where she refers to each work as a leaf in the book have evoked the word "disturbed" repeatedly, says Saba.

Her conscious use of Urdu texts, "personal letters burnt at the edges that sometimes surface and peep", have Saba questioning: "Urdu represents a culture that is under attack, then why is it being associated with a faith?"

"It is global issues that I am raising and Western buyers like and react strongly to these works,"says Saba, for whom cultures cannot be negated. Her recent works with backgrounds in whites, creams and beige are "a subconscious check", she says, that does not allow her to cross over to other colours, adding the calmness that contrasts with the rusted nails and soot where the final composition is wrapped in an element of elegance or "lyrical abstraction", as Saba defines it.

A formal training in art and its forms did not seem necessary to Saba till "I felt I required it". When she wanted to draw body forms, she enrolled herself at the E'cole de Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Germany, after being disillusioned with the training available in India.

Her tendency to drift towards abstract forms contradicts with her earlier figurative works where Saba agrees, "Even when I do figurative, somewhere I start moving towards the abstract," adding, "I have always been a conceptual abstract painter but in the process of becoming an artist, seeing other works, experimenting, the challenge to be able to do various forms motivates till one matures and finds one's true self."

In her abstract mixed media works Saba is content to have found her personal language. With some of her compositions to be displayed at the Biennale 2005 in Florence, Saba intends to further explore these elements as "I feel there is so much more to extract from them".

Her fondness of textured surfaces "that give a composition added dimensions" have had her contemplating experimentation with assemblages and objects "that are more than just material to be three dimensional".

Gallerist Sharan Apparao feels that "Saba's works in terms of intellectual content and technique are fantastic. Not frequently exhibited, she has had limited exposure but is an artist with a lot of potential."

As Saba's works travel to important international exhibitions, Sharan feels that "Saba has come to a level where she can command a good price."