Maldives through the eyes of the artist

If you have missed out on any exhibitions at the National Art Gallery (NAG), this is the time to catch up. To mark the occasion of World Tourism Day, the ministry of tourism in collaboration with NAG is holding a month-long exhibition titled “Maldives Art”.

A potpourri of work from different exhibitions held this year such as Maldives Contemporary 2009, Whimsical Poetry and Jaisalmer Yellow, is on display. This makes for an interesting display of Maldivian life in a variety of styles. Samah Ahmed’s oil painting from the Blue series transported me back to my childhood when I would float down to the bottom of a lagoon and look up at the shimmering blue waters above.

“We want to show that visual culture and tourism is very much related like the souvenir industry,” says Mamduh Waheed, deputy minister of tourism, arts and culture, explaining why the art exhibition has been included among the activities to mark World Tourism Day. “There is a huge potential for this. We also want to explore the idea of how identities are formed through images and craft.”

Mamduh believes that this is an “opaque” segment within the tourism industry at the moment. “We are not only talking about art, as in fine arts and painting, we would also like to encourage more Maldivians to take up other fields, like crafts and performing arts,” he says.

Browsing through the paintings and you realise that the picture perfect postcards scenes most commonly associated with the Maldives are depicted alongside others, which are not so visible to the average tourist.

In Ibrahim Rasheed’s watercolour, “Mending the net”, an old man is patching up his fish net, his brow furrowed in painstaking concentration while ‘Deep Mistic’, with its hues of green and yellow, lends a mystic quality to the kulhi (lake) and its surrounding mangroves.

Ali Ishaan’s (Raape) ‘Sun, Sea, Sand’ as the name suggests is the quintessential tourist brochure image that lures hundreds of thousands of tourists to the Maldives every year. The beach stretches out endlessly while a couple stands on the water’s edge, the different shades of blue capturing the colours of the sea. A sailboat on the horizon completes this languorous scene. Raape says tourists dislike abstract paintings. “The colours I have painted are the ones tourists want to see,” he says. Raape works in the souvenir trade, producing artwork for tourist consumption. “Tourists come here for the sun, sea and sand. They’re not interested in seeing weird artistic images that come from the mind of an artist,” he says. He relates an anecdote about an artist who had angered a group of tourists after drawing a scene of a girl with a rope around her neck.

Apart from the ubiquitous blue, Raape says tourists are fond of the various colours of a sunset. “Those are the colours and shades I stick to when I do paintings for tourists,” he says. He says he feels his paintings must correlate with a visitor’s blissful state of mind when holidaying in the Maldives.

Mixed in with the feel-good paintings are others that provoke thought. Hassan Ziyad’s Tsunami is one such painting. It shows a house, partially

destroyed, its outer wall lying in pieces. A window still intact shows a vista beyond the destruction.

All of the paintings on display apart from ‘Sun, Sea and Sand’ are from the national gallery’s permanent collection. Curator Ahmed Naeem says the gallery has a budget to buy paintings every year. “We take certain things into consideration, like how long the artist has worked and what type of work it is when we choose paintings,” he says.

Some of the pieces have been commissioned, like Eagan M Badeeu’s triptych – an artwork that consists of three adjacent paintings. Reminiscent of island life some time ago, it is aptly titled, ‘Goathi’ (courtyard). Two women sit near the outdoor kitchen cutting fruit. Chicken roam freely in the courtyard and children play nearby. The low outer wall of the house is visible in the background with several crows perched delicately atop and a man walking by behind. Complete with the libaas (traditional dress), the scene has been captured by Eagan’s brushstrokes to perfection.

Despite the beauty of the paintings, artists like Raape say Maldivian artists face limitations in their creativity. “For example, in the Maldives it would be impossible to create a six-feet art piece with lacquer work as we wouldn’t have the necessary items available,” he says. He believes the workshops held by foreign artists at the national gallery do not amount to much as it is impossible to find the necessary materials to put into practice what was learnt. “We have to import what we need for art work,” he says. Knowing the constraints faced by Maldivian artists, the artwork on display seems like even more of an achievement.

Maldives Art will be held at the National Art Gallery from 10am to 4pm, Sunday to Thursday until 30 October.