Elusive emotions

Amber Arifeen's paintings delve deeply in women's lives especially about identity crisis that has been faced by women around the world and also afflict women in our society. In an exhibition at Alliance Française de Karachi Amber used the female forms and figures to express her feelings regarding women and society titled "The Crisis of Woman". The exhibition was dominated by the oppressed women theme. Basically she paints with a vision and all of her works portrays feelings - hidden and obvious both very effectively.
The figurative forms were deeply sensual. The meanings, logic and language of her paintings reflected her personal references. She addressed her inner feelings through her paintings. She also used various colours, which differentiates certain feelings like dark colours show anger, loneliness and sufferings while light and bright colours are symbols of hope, joy and strength.
The glimpses of woman in her paintings became more attractive with a play of colour. While plain and patchy backgrounds created different effects in yellow, blue, red and green shades. A feeling of loneliness and happiness is evident through colours. She used colours successfully to give effects of different kinds of feelings whether serene or rage. With the help of colours she narrated her point of view.
She creates a vivid visual relationship of her intrinsic feelings on the canvas to share it with others. Her painting showed faceless women figures in various postures, indicating that every woman has her own story whether she shares it or not she has something private to tell. Thus their facial expressions were of no value as they have no identity they are just women but their body posters revealed their behaviour and reactions to the surrounding situations. The women were seemed to be battling their own wars. The do and don'ts of their lives has made their lives miserable.
She has been succeeded in conveying the message that women's also have personality and they do have different views and wanted to express their feelings just like other people around them. "We get excited by fleeting ambitions only to suffer from passion burn-out. We despise society's pressure to conform. We are talented and we know it. It weighs heavily on our shoulders to see our talents go waste. My work is the examination of this internal strife and what lies behind it," said Amber in a statement.
Hence she depicted women feelings and emotions about their surroundings. All the works come together to narrate a story about the women's affinity to their society from various perspectives. Through her works she tried to force us to look at the world in through the eyes of women the way they see the world around them. Her works revealed how during a tedious, unrelenting, and consuming time in life, perspectives gets ignored to the monotonous daily routine of life and leading one to lose sight of what's important.