Profile and Palette: Tanvir Fatima Rahman

An admirer of nature

Tanvir Fatima Rahman is an artist of a style of her own who not only painted the stretched canvases on the easel, but her restless soul forced her to visualize the beauty on the large scale of silver screen. She, after establishing her name as a painter, became the first female set designer of our film industry, who earned international recognition and the status of a role-model for many young women. Tanvir is a person with a tender heart, solid ideas and unyielding will-power; a complete blend for an artist.

She started painting when she was a student at the National College of Arts where she had the company of Ghulam Mustafa, Mehboob Ali and the guidance of Saeed Akhtar as her teacher. Tanvir has been painting in naturalistic colours, and most of her compositions exhibit convoluted twigs and textured trunks, at times with delicate leaves and sometimes with the jovial rendering of flowers.

Tanvir is an admirer of nature and considers it as the reflection of the Almighty, who is the ultimate Creator. She believes that through art, one can learn to find and then capture elements of beauty in ordinary things, which ultimately can take him or her close to the Creator or Khaliq.

Tanvir is one of the founder members of the Young Painters’ Association which was established in the eventful 1970s.

Painting flowers and leaves, has always been Tanvir’s passion as this subject is never difficult to find. Many of her paintings display trees, flowers and leaves, which actually were breathing in the lawns of her home. Looking at particular tree or delicate flowers or leaves, can ignite her to capture the subtle shades, intricate form and sometimes their shimmering reflection in water; all these elements together weave her canvases into colourful paintings that express the painter’s deep involvement with her surroundings.

Tanvir Rahman comments on it: “I personally like flowers, trees, different kinds of leaves with diversity in shape and color, and they are always around; you need not to find them in awkward places or far-flung areas. Very often, it is just like having a look onto my lawn, which leads me to pick my brush and paint straightaway.”

Tanvir is one of the founder members of the Young Painters’ Association which was established in the eventful 1970s. She along with Shahbaz Khan, worked hard to organize this group of young artists and to provide them a platform to exhibit their latest work. It also served the juvenile talent to be exhibited in an organized and proper way that might address and attract the viewer and the buyer at the same time. Later when AAP (Artists’ Association of Punjab) was founded, Tanvir joined it with devotion and sincerity. There were very respectable and reputed artists who laid the foundation stone of the association. Mian Ijaz ul-Hassan, Naseem H. Qazi, Khalid Iqbal, Abbasi Abidi, Zulqarnain Haider, Salima Hashmi, Ghulam Mustafa and Shahnawaz Zaidi all devoted their time and effort for AAP. For almost a decade up to 1994-95, Tanvir served the association as its general secretary.

Tanvir with a tiny little flower, or a newly born leaf, rendered innocently at her canvas, personifies, in a very surrealistic manner, the hidden or concealed aspects of human life which, every one of us has always been afraid of… to reveal.

When Tanvir Rahman started designing sets for movies; she could not give time to her painting. The more she became popular and successful in set-designing, the more distant she found herself, from painting. However, it is a fact that in all the bad moments and sorrows of her life when she felt dejected and down, she held her painting brush strongly to apply colours of her mood on the canvas. This practice has always been fruitful and in fact, caused the much-needed catharsis in a very natural way. Last year, when she lost her loving husband, she shared her sadness with tiny leaves, fragile branches and blooming flowers.

In her recent work, Tanvir seems to be exploring the depth of perspective in her landscape paintings. This is relatively a new change in her style as in her earlier paintings; she is found focusing candidly on the details of tree-trunks, shape of leaves or shades of flowers. This approach may label her as a landscape painter. However, her deep and emotional observation of nature has constantly been her forte. Tanvir with a tiny little flower, or a newly born leaf, rendered innocently at her canvas, personifies, in a very surrealistic manner, the hidden or concealed aspects of human life which, every one of us has always been afraid of… to reveal.