Mehjabeen Saifullah 

I was born in Karachi, Pakistan and spent most of my childhood there. I was self-taught from a young age and discovered my artistic abilities while in elementary school. I was always a very visual learner, creating art in different ways to help myself understand anything we were learning in school. 

Using art as a tool for learning, such as drawing, helped me to develop the basic skills I went on to use in my more refined practices as well. I started to take painting more seriously when I was 17 and graduated high school. I decided to go to college for visual arts and took art classes with Sir Mashkoor Raza and Sir Azir Zubi. Sir Mashkoor Raza taught me how to draw, how to create perspective in a painting, and we used to practice my skills through making still life paintings and painting animal figures in motion. Sir Azir Zubi taught me penwork, figurative drawing, anatomy, chiaroscuro through penwork. When I moved to Canada in the 90s, I continued my education at York University and achieved BFA specialized honours in visual arts, as well as a Bachelors in education.

In terms of my artistic process, first, I like to find an image or a scene that will inspire me to pick up the paint brush. This can be anything from a landscape, an image of an animal, something I see on my walks, or an old architectural building or scene that reminds me of home. Then, I look at the organization of the figures and the overall colour scheme of the image. I loosely sketch and draw right on the canvas, creating contours for everything I see. Next, I look at the background and the foreground, and map out my use of colour accordingly (for example if the foreground includes a body of water and the sky is also blue, I think about dark and light shades to separate the sky and water, while also focusing on shading) I use an array of different techniques, including blending with my fingers and a pallet knife. By filling in the dark and light spaces (negative and positive space) I start to create more concrete images that are noticeable but still a bit distorted with loose brushstrokes and add more detail as I go along. While painting, I also try not to focus too much on the actual image I'm painting from, so the painting tends to get distorted and mixes with my own thoughts and imagination, and I also deviate from the original colours seen in the image with colours that I am naturally more drawn towards. This makes me not get bored of what I'm painting!