Shehla Rehman - a thematic painter

Communicating through lines and colours is a difficult task and there are not many painters who have the necessary skill in this art of speaking to their audience with the warmth of a passionate silence. A silence that remonstrates and asserts, and at times, dreams up what is ordinarily impossible for the people of weaker emotional responsiveness to notice and then to enliven the subliminal and the abstract messages into the concrete.
It is no ordinary feat even for an educated, methodical and enlightened painter who has some standing among his equals. He, who knows the language of quietude and has written unsaid words on a sheet of canvas with the help of a squirrel-hair brush and colours, knows well that on most of the occasions succeeding in initiating a dialogue between a painter and his audience is a ticklish matter.
A communicator who chooses this medium of lines, shapes and masses and colours to express his thoughts in the hope of getting a response to his packaged communication material is the one who is aware of his message content. He is the one who is eager to react to responses that his works call forth and he is the one who expands his point of view even on the slightest provocation from his audience.
This expansion may be through more thematic paintings carried out in a series and completed in chronological order that leads to an argumentatively acceptable conclusion or through short and scattered versions of flashes of philosophical musings that just sweep across the mind. In both the cases it is the mastery that succeeds and it is the expansion that brings out the unseen into the open. It is the process, which juxtaposes the obscure and the obvious to make communication effective and meaningful.
A review of the work done by Shehla Rehman during these past twenty years is a serious business because she has been dealing with the obscure and the obvious in a masterly manner. She has portrayed the subtleties of the two conditions in a befitting manner in her recent paintings. She has boldly talked about the evil in men that harms the weak and the unprotected. This is, however, one aspect of her work.
Shehla is well aware how evil supports the privileged and the sinful who in turn blot out the entire civility from a civil society and take it to a point of complete savagery. Her paintings on flesh trade, Karo Kari, camel kids, terrorism and domestic violence are some of the examples that tell the story of tormented souls.
These paintings and many more on sensitive subjects that have come out of Shehla's studios and reached the exhibition galleries between 1987-2004 have touched the sensibilities of the helpless civil society. Her paintings have brought to light issues that many painters would not like to discuss as they are of little commercial value. What she has earned out of her paintings is a place which money can not buy - a respectable name among the few painters Pakistan can be proud of.
She believes that repeated discussion on social evils that in one way or the other lead to the usurpation of human rights need to be kept alive. Her paintings depicting plight of the Afghan children and women and the continuation of sufferings that war had brought to them is an illustrated history of the region. Similarly her work on the abuse of power by the tribal influential, terrorism, domestic violence and crime against women and exploitation of children for various purposes are running commentaries on loathsome issues at home and across the Durand Line in Afghanistan.
Through her paintings she tells how men can become beasts when it comes to worldly gains. How children become chattels and how women become consumable items for many people who otherwise look normal. There are many more stories Shehla has narrated through her paintings and recorded her protest against the evil of the worst kind.
At times she paints landscape and portraits as well. Her love for animals, nature conservation and environmental pollution are some of the other areas of her interest. Horse has probably attracted her attention most. She has adorned her furniture designs as well as her many paintings with trotting horses.
Shy of talking her personal life and interests Shehla says, "It is suffice to say I like to be on a horseback trotting in meadows. I think it explains every thing about me."
Shehla was born in Malaysia. She lived there for about 16 years, did her A Level and graduated in Art History in 1986. Soon after her graduation she traveled to Europe and spent a few years there to learn the basics of paintings in painters-rich places such as France and Italy. After visiting a few more cities in the Western Europe, she decided to settle in Pakistan. She is one of the outstanding artists of Pakistan who has greatly contributed toward the advancement of fine arts in this country which has fast gone commercial and seemingly lost all love for fine arts.
Shehla has worked with Sadequain for about two years. During her stay in Rome, she worked with a senior Italian artist Yehya Shafi. She is recipient of Sadequain Award 1966 and Turkish Award Anatalya Turkey in 1992. For "Dresses of Pakistan", title of four postage stamps she designed for the Pakistan Postal Services, she received awards in appreciation of her work in 1998. She has eight solo exhibitions and six group exhibitions to her credit. She has exhibited her work in Turkey 1997, Dubai 1992, Berne, Switzerland, 2002 and Korea 2003. The subject of her paintings has been terrorism, womanhood and violence against women and children. Her portraits of Kamal Ata Turk in 1992 and of His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan in 1993 have brought her laurels.
In between these portraits, designs, paintings on current topics and and a few commercial undertakings, she has done landscapes, portraits of common and interesting faces and still life. She is equally at ease with watercolour and oil. She has tried her hands at acrylics as well.
From her paintings it can be noticed that she maintains perfect balance while dealing with watercolour, a difficult medium. Since colour is the primary expressive element, she has been extra careful in the selection of colour and its shades. It is this reason that texture, volume and space and time and movement in her paintings have given depth to her imagination and paintings.
Being a focussed painter Shehla has, over a period of time, graduated from a painter in her teens exploring romance in colour, landscape and wavy and saucy figures of humans to a thematic painter. Her subjects are diverse and her treatment of each subject is completely in accordance with its requirement. Her paintings have focussed on daily life issues that bring happiness as well as moments of grief. Her obsession with landscape and the roaring sea is another side of the story that needs exclusive narration.