‘Painting helps in relieving stress’: Sopore’s self-taught artist fascinated by nature
Post by on Wednesday, July 27, 2022
The natural beauty around inspires us with all our creative passions. For Rouf Qayasi, a teacher by profession and artist by hobby, it is the relationship between humans and environment and the elements of nature that fascinates him to create his stunning and scenic paintings.
Rouf , 49, a resident of Shalimar Colony Sopore in north Kashmir’s Baramulla started painting when he was in 6th standard.
“Art is so important to me. It is passion and I feel like I have been through an evolution process over these years of painting nature. Earlier, I used to draw portraits but now my focus is on painting nature using different hues.
“I work as a full-time teacher at a school and painting helps me a lot in relieving the stress. Believe me painting is my unpaid therapist,” he added.
I don’t copy nature but I follow nature and sometimes we create the work between being and nothingness. I am portraying the artist's way of looking at nature. I convert landscape into mindscape, as how it looks in my mind. Nature looks different when you see it through an artist's eye,” Rouf told Rising Kashmir.
The self-taught artist has several awards to his name including Creative Award-2012, Art Camps 2012; Annual award at Art Exhibition-2016; Lavender Festival Award- 2014 and J&K Cultural Academy- 2016. His collection is found in the galleries of India and abroad.
In the 51st Annual State Exhibition, the J&K Academy of Art, Culture and Languages (JKAACL) awarded a cash prize of Rs 51,000 to Rouf Qayasi for painting in mix-media. Around 167 Art works were received by the Academy for the exhibition.
Recently his creative work under the title “Waterfall” was selected for the International Art Exhibition that is being organized every year by the Jammu & Kashmir Centre for Creative Arts (JKCCA).
In 2014-2015, Rouf bagged annual state award for his series- ‘The Village’. It was adjudged one of the best paintings among other 165 paintings.
Right now Qayasi is working on another series, “Conversation with nature”.
He draws his work on paper, canvas and has a huge collection, depicting village life, landscapes, art, mountains and waterfalls on the paper and canvas.
Rouf’s art work consists more of nature. Besides painting, he also trains young boys, provides them classes, checks their paintings and guides them and even is invited as a jury at many painting events both by government functionaries and private organisers.
Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh and M A Mehboob are his inspirations and mentors in this journey, he adds.
“Several poets, authors have used my paintings as their book titles/covers including Fayaz Tligami, Shafaq Sopori, Mushtaq Barq, Yusuf Jahanger and others. Also the paintings are available online,” he said.
“When you sketch, paint, you gain the power to overcome hardships. It releases you of the stress, pain. For a common man, the world is the same every other day. But the artist looks at it in a different way every other minute. For that you should have the love for beauty and aesthetic taste. Painting has a starting point but no end point. Art never dies. You sketch your inner world and draw it on paper using different colors,” he added.
