The artistic scene in Sana’a: Painters speak (IV), Mazher Nizar.

Born in India, Mazher Nizar’s work is deeply inspired by his adopted country: Yemen. He studied Graphic Art in Calcutta and in 1985 decided to come to his father’s homeland, of Yemen. Since then, he has been working in Sana’a inspired by veiled Yemeni women from the old city, who are an essential part of his work. A founding member of the Sana’ani Modern Art Group and of the Atelier Group, his work is permanently displayed at the atelier him, Amnah al-Nasiri and Talal al-Naggar entertain near Bab al-Yemen.

Yemen Observer (YO): -What do you want to transmit through your work? Mazher Nizar (MN): -What I want to do is to go beyond. I do not want to put myself in fragments. My painting should make your eyes go back to it, it should provoke something in your mind that tells you to go deeper. A good painting should hypnotize you. It should hold you for a while, otherwise another painting will take you. This is what is in my mind, how can I provoke this, how can I mix techniques to create something interesting for your eyes that you cannot move away. For the painting to come out like that, you need time to create, to express. I want to work in this line but in larger paintings and not only in small pieces. I know large paintings are difficult to sell, but this is a matter of satisfying myself and this is the moment for me to prove myself as an artist.  

YO: -How is your everyday work?
MN: -It depends on my mood. Sometimes I want to do graphics and my materials are ready, but perhaps when I face it I feel I need to do something different. I mix techniques and every piece always comes up different from one another. Perhaps one night I start playing with water colors and what starts in red ends in green. I work at home and sometimes I like to experiment with acrylic on canvas, sometimes I am watching TV and I feel in the mood and I end up painting something. This is very different from graphics because the first day is for printing, then you have to let it dry, and the second day I sit down and I retouch them. Sometimes I do not need to retouch them but some others I want to go further and I try to do experiment with new things.  

YO: -Would you say you have a specific style?
MN: -I do not stick to any style or school and what I do is to follow my mood. Sometimes I am very abstract, some others very realistic. Sometimes I sit down for two or three days to paint realistic water colors and all of the sudden I get tired and I change the entire painting. I follow what satisfies me. I never like to do the same format or the same size or the same style. I can go from very flashy to very realistic. All my life I have been attracted to details, to mysterious areas, to little things…I am very attracted to this and I follow it. I follow my instincts because if you follow what others want you to paint, then you loose yourself. You have to do what you want and only in that way you will be able to create something especial. For instance, I am fascinated by the capacity of some artists who have created pieces of art which centuries later still provoke questions. The need to find something else in the painting, something new every time you look at it, that is what is most important. How can I do that, I do not know yet, but towards this is where I want my work to go.  

YO: What is your experience as an artist based in Yemen?
MN: -In Yemen if you are an artist, you are isolated. You are a contemporary painter but what contemporary means to the audience is not understood here. The audience, your audience, does not know what you are doing. Among the community of artists here in Sana’a we create groups of people who appreciate what we do, but is not the majority of the people. What you do or paint here, in Yemen, you do it for yourself or for abroad. We believe in ourselves and we want to continue, but it is difficult because there is no audience and people are not interested in our art. This is a big problem and it causes many people to turn to other jobs and leave their art projects aside. That is a problem for Yemeni artists. Also the fact that we depend on foreign invitations to keep our work moving around makes it difficult. To be an artist here is highly complicated: if you are an artist, God help you. You either have other sources of income or you can go through very taught times, especially having family and in Yemen people do not have one kid only; they have three, four or five. 

YO: -Is the situation better in India?
MN:-In India artists can sell their work from hundreds to millions of dollars. India has many artists, there is an art market, people survive from their work, from little-known artists to well-known artists. Articles are written about art pieces and artists, galleries host artists’ works, artist’s works move around the country… you cannot compare India to Yemen. Compared to them, sometimes people tell me I made a big mistake coming to Yemen to be an artist here. In Yemen you are nothing in comparison to India. There is a big movement in the art circle in India and nothing like that happens here.  

YO: - Why did you decide to come to Yemen? 
MN: -When my father was 15 years old, in the 1940’s, he left Yemen to India. In India there was a Yemeni religious group called the Ismail’is and he joined them, they helped him a lot and he stayed with them. He became a sort of priest, a mullah. He taught the Qur’an to children but he did not have any other jobs besides this. One night he said he wanted to go back to Yemen and we were all shocked. He left, came here, and took my older brother with him, starting a new life in Yemen. After that I also came here because I did not have anything in India and I decided that if I wanted to start there, why not start in Yemen. There were many artists in India and here it was like a brand new place for art. In 1985 the situation, economically speaking, was really good. The Riyal was strong because we were backed up by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, but after the Gulf War things changed dramatically. I came at the right time. Today I could easily decide to move away to Dubai, to Canada, because if you do something serious in Yemen there will be no audience to appreciate it. People here just tell you that you work is “pretty,” or “nice” but they do not go further than that, they do not critique art.  Critiques make you wake up, make you improve, that is why they are so important.

YO: -And the women from your paintings, they do not provoke critiques? MN: -No one has ever, ever said anything about my women. Not even about the fact that sometimes there is nudity in my work, no one dares say anything. Is true that I do not go beyond the limits and I always paint in a respectful way, never vulgar. I cannot miss women’s forms: I cannot paint women without their forms because otherwise it would not be a woman. I am a controversial painter in this sense and in Saudi Arabia for example, they never said a word about this. Women highly appreciate my work, and to me, women are essential in my work. I am very lucky that in my paintings people do not see bad things and they like it. I want to show women in a delicate way, in a sensitive manner. The forms of a woman are essential and without them, women are not complete and I make that clear in my paintings. People have to accept it, Adam and Eve are different, a woman is a woman. She can be your sister, your wife, your lover but she is a woman. My point is that the forms of a woman play an important role in my composition, you cannot avoid it. I do not want to hide it and if I draw nude women I do not hide them either. I exhibit this work here in Yemen because I came to a point where I do not care about reactions. In this sense, I am trying to break barriers but always in a decent way. Women remain a main subject for me. I have asked myself many times ‘why women?’ and my answer is simple: I just feel my work is completed when I draw something that belongs to a woman be it her hand, her foot, her body. I do not mind to be a woman’s painter, because this is what I want to paint even if my paintings are abstract. I am complete when I paint a woman in my pieces. Without women I cannot paint. Without them, I am not there either. 

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