My Artistic Sense
I like to bend rules, push instead of pull, let my senses guide me. I struggle to read a map, but I can detect patterns in piles and piles of data to come to fantastic conclusions. Be it with numbers or with that in the creation. My single greatest obsession is with the composition of ... everything that exists. The patterns that you find repeating in disparate things. How the tiniest most invisible thing mimics that largest ... and also most invisible thing in cosmos. I am acutely aware of our place in the universe. A tiny flickering spec in the colossal kaleidoscope!
My art is many things, highly contradictory, stuffed with puns and play on concepts. Is it this or is it that or is it neither? It's tongue-in-cheek. And I don't like to explain those bits. If you get it, you get it. It's also dark, I like to stare the demons right in their eyes. I can't help but capture entities in awkward transformations, and force the individual self to face hard truths. A good portion is celebratory. A celebration of female. A celebration of freedom of thought and form. A celebration of my culture. A celebration of what makes my people uniquely them. Can't separate me from my land and its ways. Even if those ways have sometimes been my shackles. I believe in the power of the soil where you are born. I believe it fundamentally shapes you.
My artwork is my life on paper. As much as I love oil on canvas, I have taken in a big way to pens, so now I largely make watercolour and acrylic pieces accented by penwork. Join me for a journey into an unbridled world, where everything DOES NOT make sense. And that's OK.
The majority of my life has gone in questioning and understanding the cosmos, self, and our relationship with the metaphysical. The tussles between the individual will versus that of which is laid upon us has always been part of my inner struggle. As is the dichotomy of self-control vs inner abandon. The spiritual side of me, trained from birth at tempering excessive desires and temptations is often at battle with my creative side, that which wants to let loose and break the barrier of pre-determined thought. The side that revels in the creations of God, and is hungry to be surrounded by the beautiful things, and intelligent things, and tangible testimonies of human endeavour.
Rabia describes herself as a born again artist, having picked up the brush and pen after a seven year hiatus. In 2023, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and was successfully treated at Hamad Medical Corporation in Doha. But during her difficult journey of chemo-therapy she chose to use her forced hiatus to return to her first love in life - art, and found herself approaching it in an entirely new way.
My Journey as an Artist
I am fundamentally a creative soul. Art, writing, design, photography, sewing, knitting, and other crafts that utilize your mind AND body are all part of a singular spectrum to me. And I love them all. My earliest memories are that of me drawing. I remember being five and participating in art competitions and walking away with wins.
Society however, has a way of strait-lacing everything. In the world I grew up academics were of colossal importance, and eventually studies took precedence over everything else. When I graduated school, I was discouraged from pursuing a formal degree in art, which is what I really wanted to do. Plus the little introduction I had received to art was so entrenched in the classical and technical, it seemed daunting to pursue the field by myself. I never felt like I would measure up.
Fast forward twenty years later, having shaken off constructs fed to us as children, understanding that pretty much everything in life is context - a visual from your vantage point, framed by its environment, I find myself liberated. I make what I make without thought to its audience. But when the eyes of someone else fall upon my work, I am consumed by the curiosity to know how they interpret what they see. Like a Rorscharch inkblot test.
The Childhood Influences
As a child I grew up in a sea of books. My librarian mom made sure that we were introduced to every kind. I remember poring over the illustrations for hours, and absorbing all the magical words that breathed life into those illustrations. Fairy tales were my favourite - and Russian fairy tales with their sweeping illustrations still remain an enthralling audio-visual in my mind. This was my first taste with the vividity of free imagination - subject purely to interpretation.
Right from childhood, I saw things in nature and the world around me, that weren't easily perceptible to others. Patterns, magic, colours, textures - in a way that has been uniquely mine. What was labelled as "weird" by the world is now my greatest strength. The sensory seeking behaviours , the inability to miss even the tiniest detail, and a brain that never shuts off - traits that are a bane in normal life, but a boon for creative pursuit. And living in a country like India, you are constantly bombarded with stimuli of every kind, art of every kind, nature of every kind, and it's impossible to not have it settle in every fibre of your being.
The "Bio-data"
Rabia has an undergraduate degree in mass media from Mount Carmel College in Bangalore. She went on to acquire a masters in linguistics (just for the sheer pleasure), and after a few years of working in the burgeoning IT industry, she joined Nanyang Technological University in Singapore for another masters in information science. This was followed but an exciting decade across South & South East Asia working with startups to build new products and take them to market. She moved to Qatar in 2015 to join her husband, and started Inaara in 2020, a brand centered around bringing Indian artisanal products to the middle east. She lives in Doha with her husband and two kids.