Dragons are found in the collective imaginary of most cultures. While they may have different significations—being evil or affectionate, shy, aggressive or wily—these creatures have exerted an enduring fascination over many civilizations because of their enthralling appearance and otherworldliness. Dragons crop up in the Persian epic poem the Shahnameh, Mughal miniature paintings, European medieval courtly romances, and in modern literature from The Lord of the Rings to Harry Potter. For the feminist novelist and poet Ursula K. Le Guin, dragons symbolized freedom: freedom to imagine and to open one’s mind to the possibilities and truths of fantasy. “People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within,” she wrote. Dragons tap into something primordial within us, if we allow it.
Karachi-born artist Hiba Schahbaz, who trained in Indo-Persian miniature painting at the National College of Art in Lahore, has long painted dragons. Her London show "Summer of Dragons" brings together 15 paintings of these mythical creatures across a variety of mediums and formats; in watercolor on tea-stained, handmade paper, watercolor on wood and oil on linen. For the first time, the artist is also presenting a book, titled Book of Dragons, and two wooden boxes painted with these creatures. Yet where Eastern and Western iconographies of dragons tend to show them in combat with valiant male warriors, Schahbaz’s fire-breathing beasts, in contrast, are portrayed as protectors and allies of women. Occasionally they are even hybridized as female, half-human chimeras.
A pair of watercolor paintings titled Metamorphosis depicts a nude woman kneeling serenely in turquoise ether, her flowing hair morphing into a dragon’s sinuous body as pink birds flutter around them. In one, the woman and dragon face away from each other, while in the companion work, the beast’s body arches around to commune with its human half. The two parts of these dragon-women appear to be in harmonious equilibrium, entwined by delicately wafting tendrils and wisps of smoke and clouds, rendered in intricate detail.
It had not been Schahbaz’s intention to study miniature painting, but she became transfixed by its ritualistic procedures. Apprentices learn to make their brushes, paper, and pigment sitting on the floor with no shoes on giant white sheets; they absorb the craft from masters as if by osmosis, repetitively drawing hundreds of tiny lines on numerous pages. Orhan Pamuk’s 1998 murder-mystery-romance My Name Is Red, set within the 16th-century milieu of miniaturists at the Ottoman court of Sultan Murat III, eloquently conveys the challenge for these artists: to create narrative works of beauty without competing with God by portraying realistic figures in his likeness. In the novel, a commission to produce an illustrated book for the sultan in the new, blasphemous Venetian style of recognizable portraiture provokes divisions among the miniaturists that turn out to be deadly.
Opening Hours
Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
Location:
Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House,
W1K 3JH London UK
Text and pictures, copyright almine reich and the artist