An Interview with Shah Bukht Fatima

Questions by Shallom Johnson, Art Editor

Tell me a bit about your life as an artist. What does your daily creative practice look like?

Sometimes I deal with a lot of new ideas, trying new techniques and other days I struggle with finding the right motivation and inspiration. Since I am not a full time artist and have to learn a lot given I am self taught, it requires a lot of pre-planning for me. Generally, my creative practice is saving a lot of art tutorials, inspirations and ideas and just finding the right time to correctly work on them.

You have recently begun creating artwork on commission. What was your journey like to get to this point in your career?

I have been making art since I was very young and always wanted to study art. Little me didn’t know she could keep working on her art and didn’t necessarily need to get a degree for it so that realization that I could still do it professionally was quite late. Also, due to my education fields being completely different from visual arts, the only visuals involved in my studies were initially biology diagrams and then visualization of economic statistics! After I completed my Mphil the pandemic came, and I finally had the time and clarity to just indulge in my silly little paintings again. That’s when I started painting, as initially I just used to sketch pencil portraits.

One day I randomly painted a scene from a Ghibli movie, posted it on social media and somebody bought it! That really gave me the confidence to keep continuing it. Surprisingly, as a beginner artist, I got many requests for commissioned artwork and the commissions didn’t stop thankfully. It really happened just like my parents would tell me, to focus on my studies because I can do my artwork after I am done with my education and comically enough that’s what happened (insert evil laugh).

Tell me about this piece, We need to talk about the lemons. What was your inspiration? What was the process from inspiration to finished product?

We need to talk about the lemons was a little experiment I did with my art style, as I was trying to create something of my own and slightly different from what I usually created (landscapes and fanart basically). My initial inspiration was the abstract graphic art style I saw while going through some magazines. I wanted to illustrate something expressing my life in the context of existing as a woman, employing those styles.

This artwork, as I titled it altering the proverb ‘when life gives you lemons you make lemonade’, is focused on the lemons more than the lemonade. I have always found this expression not as positive as it has been implied to be, because life doesn’t really give you lemons and lemons aren’t something bad either so it just never made sense to me (I identify as a hater of technically incorrect proverbs and expressions). What I depicted was just the existence of a face; my face or simply a woman’s existence within the bounds and rigors of patriarchy. The brain doesn’t exist in this frame of reference as we keep creating lemonade from the supposed lemons thrown at us by life, but it does not matter at all since the whole idea is fundamentally wrong.

We need to talk about the lemons is about questioning the lemons. To me, what we call lemons are simply the unfairness of patriarchy and its stereotypes, internalized by everyone in most cases. I only added the lobe of the ear to the face to depict how we are limited from listening to and thinking about alternative and marginalized ideas and opinions, and the lemons in the eyes to show the same internalization and acceptance of whatever has been fed to us since the beginning regarding life, hardships, right and wrong and what-should-be in a gendered background.

I hung a cat as an earring to add the stereotype of the crazy cat lady (being one myself) and how all this design of othering women, creating harmful stereotypes of them and for them, only to justify the inequalities they face in an intersectional setting. I also added a dance floor-ish background to give the performative nature of our lives because I just went haywire with adding concepts. As Shakespeare said, all the world’s a dance floor, right.

Which artists are inspiring you lately?

I keep finding such amazing artists every other day! Recently, I have been following the artwork of Zahra Azhar, a Pakistani still life and fantasy oil painter. Her technique and compositions are so hauntingly unique and have a strange nostalgic quality to them and her work really inspires me to create better oil work.

My favorite landscape artists these days are the French artist Sergiu Ciochina and Pakistani artist Aimen Khan. My favorite thing about their work is their use of colors and light/shadow by Sergiu and the detailing and perspective of Aimen’s art.

Another Pakistani fantasy artist Benazir Khan Lodhi has also been inspiring me to do more Gouache work as her extremely detailed fantasy and fairy-core illustrations are wonderful. Maria Dimova is also one of my favorites these days for her amazing portrait illustrations.

Your work explores many mediums, from digital to oils, gouache to pen and more. What is your favorite medium to work with, and why?

I feel every medium has a different outcome, pros and cons, and every medium brings something new to work with so I cannot really pick a favorite. But I have come to find that using all the traditional mediums in digital form is quite interesting and more efficient for me. Especially given my issues with focus, I have found digital painting to be really better in the context of easy access as you don’t need to set up your gadgets and create a certain atmosphere which you might typically need for the non-digital artworks.

Does your writing have an effect on your visual art, and vice versa? How do these two creative streams intersect?

My writing and visual art generally do not intersect much. I have been writing more of unhinged gore and horror while my artwork has been more inclined towards vibrant portraits and landscapes. Although I really wish I could mix them more since it has been one of my art and writing goals to express my dreams/ nightmares in both forms. Hopefully, in the near future I might create a space of similarity between the two!

Where can our readers view more of your work?

You can view my artwork on my Instagram and my writings on Commaful and Medium profiles.

Shah Bukht Fatima is a Pakistani writer and visual artist. She indulges in both traditional and digital paintings and illustrations, in various art styles and mediums. Her artwork intends to utilize the female gaze in addition to simply creating things which make her happy. She has also published three poems in the anthology series titled “Tales of the Heart” published by The Black Ink publications.