Painting meets poetry in 'whimsical' exhibition

A painter invariably chooses his brush to express his imagination while a poet's mind flows through his pen, they say. But, for young artist Tarab Khan, painting and poetry are perfectly complementary forces as echoed in her current exhibition here.
Reality and fantasy come colliding in a riot of colours as this 29-year-old artist lets her "whimsical imagination" run wild on the canvas, for a body of work, aptly titled 'Whimsical 2', which opened up for view recently.
"For me painting and poetry are not different but only complementary sides of my life. I write poems and and do paintings on them and vice versa, like you see them on display alongside some of the paintings here," says Tarab.

So, the viewer is invited to dive into an abstract pool of colours splashed on the canvas as in 'A Bunch of Lilies' or soar high into a 'Flight of Fantasy' as also it takes him on a visual and verbal journey 'In the Continuum of Space & Time' to the wider universe, collapsed in a frame.
While majority of her work completed over the last few years, are in a single frame, some are done in diptych and triptych too, magnifying the scale of the colourful spectrum.
"For me, two paintings are very special, 'The Fury' and 'A Piece' as both in a way represent my innermost feelings on canvas. While 'Fury' I did while I was literally furious and angry in my mind, 'A Piece' was inspired in the aftermath of the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai," Tarab told PTI.

"The 26/11 attack on Taj Hotel in Mumbai was very disturbing for me and so I painted this work and called it 'A Piece' and also wrote a poem on it, which I have displayed beside the painting. It talks about communal discord over just 'a piece' of land," she adds.