Palwasha Qazi is a Canadian Abstract artist living in Ottawa Ontario. She is best known for her use of colours and large-size abstract landscape and contemporary paintings. Qazi’s artistic journey started after completing her high school; while she immigrated from Afghanistan to Pakistan. She began studying arts at a private institution where she learned basic drawing, working with water colour and acrylic as well as miniature arts work. After immigrating to Canada, beside her studies she also took classes in visual arts. Currently she is in her 4th year as a visual Arts (BFA) student in the University of Ottawa, specializing in painting; while at the same time focusing on building a collection of works. Qazi intents to continue creating abstract and contemporary art. Her main medium in painting is acrylic and her abstract work is usually done in acrylic and often with mixed media materials.
The primary focus in Palwasha Qazi’s work is to express vibrant colour, form, and texture across the canvas. Her process of painting begins with random brush strokes of colours, then works intuitively responding to the direction the painting suggests. Most of Qazi’s works are about exploring and experimenting with a variety of methods of applying colour and textures. The other themes, Qazi explores, focuses around migration, nature, power of natural world, emotion and challenges, geological times, and passage of time. The themes are combined by different elements of painting in a space. These elements emphasized by adding more texture in which depth of many layers of materials capture the complexity of life and challenges; the texture also gives a visual sense to the viewer and invites them to touch and experience the paintings. By incorporating movement in the painting as it is symbolic to migration the places we inhabit and build as well as the passage of time. By use of colour which brings emotion the paintings bring memories and imaginings to mind, adding colour is an expression of how we are feeling when we are creating our artwork.
Some more themes
Nature Abstraction:
What is interesting is the beauty of nature different colours of nature we have around us. The power of natural world is another fascination, we can imagine volcanoes and the beauty and horror of massive eruptions and the lava flows. The theme of nature includes Qazi’s floral and mixed media landscape paintings as they are tribute to the beauty of nature.
Geological Time Abstraction:
I have been focusing on the theme of geological time. What is interesting to me is the physical formation and development of the Earth. What is more interesting is the different ways of transforming rocks. How a rock becomes mud, clay, gravel, dust, time evolution of a rock transforms the shape of a rock to another. When rocks are affected by weathering, cooling, melting, heat, pressure, erosion, fracture, squeezing together. The rocks that creates from particles of sand, shells pebbles over a long period of time they form in layers and hardens into rocks and the layered sandstones produces a gritty texture; some rocks have many different textures. I am inspired in the way the rocks create layers and textures with the sharpness, hardness to them.
As a growing artist, Palwasha Qazi takes part in art exhibitions, the annual exhibitions of various organizations. Qazi’s works has been exhibited at:
- Paradigm Gallery
- Heart Wood House Gallery
- Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
- Expressions of Muslim Women
- Summer Art Festivals
- Rawlicious Restaurant – Ottawa
- Leon’s Furniture store – Ottawa