Flowers are seen in provision and brilliant colours in the paintings of Muslim artists and painters. Now, senior citizen and with silver hairs, Shammi, also a close relative of the famous intellectual, the late Eqbal Ahmed, offers a collection of 19 canvases of oil paintings on view at the Hunerkada Art Academy.
Shammi has given the name 'Summer Blossoms' to her series of art works, in which we see a range of lilies and the national flower jasmine painted in oil. She has painted these flowers in simple setting and style, often against a background of foliage, and plants.
Her painted lilies, specially the day's lily, are a study in the thousand years of devotion that went behind their cultivated ornamentation and their shinning white colours.
The painting of the national flower, jasmine, also painted in oil, take you to a different frame of mind because they also representing the physical attribute of thorns, perhaps representing the agony, the nation had to pass through in its struggle for democratic dispensation to prevail in national life, which offers a testimony of visionary element in her art work.
Although she has graduated in fine arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and also attended several art courses at the Hunerkada Gallery, a remarkable fact is that she paints to divert her mind from several psychiatric problems she suffers from.
Shammi explained that she had painted these flowers after looking at the garden in her Satellite Town home and also at many different locations in and around Rawalpindi Town. Talking to Business Recorder, Jamal Shah, Director Hunerkada Academy paid glorious tributes for her devotion to art considering her disabilities.
He also praised her choice of colour, intensity in her focused imagery, and said that Shammi first begins to paint them in watercolours and in fact the watercolours are specimens of very good art. This is Shammi's fourth solo exhibition at the Hunerkada although many art galleries had offered her space to exhibit her works.