Shahid Parvez

While in India I was lucky enough to meet this wonderful person and artist Shahid Parvez.  He was extremely welcoming and was so excited to see us and share his practice and ideas about art with us. Shahid’s own practice is centred around ‘a subtle blend of an adult’s experience and a child like fantasy.’ This combined with inspiration from folk art comes through clearly when you view his work. 
He decided to tell us about a recent project he has worked on, the whole thing was a public art piece focusing on children. A company sponsored the project as part of their give back to the community scheme. 500 wooden rocking horses were created by a very small business in Udaipur as Shahid always tries to support small businesses when he can, otherwise they may all die out. 
Once the horses were made up he got his university students involved and had them painted in block colours, all pastel tones. Once this was complete over the course of 3 days 50o children turned up and had a hours to themselves to decorate. 

While this was going on Shahid had a giant horse created which he would paint with his own style. This huge piece of installation work was then first exhibited in the grounds of Udaipur’s City Palace.

On the UdaipurTimes website I found a great article written about the work, which is available by clicking here.

His work is not directly related to mine, but I have for many years volunteered with young children within the World Scout Movement. This is why I found it so interesting hearing about this particular project. I have always found children’s way of perceiving and drawing fascinating, which is why Shahid’s practice is of such interest. 

While we were talking to Shahid he also mentioned how he liked to change medium, from print to paint and 3D. He believed this kept his work fresh and kept it challenging, otherwise there is the tendency for artists to keep doing what they originally found worked. This is why I am trying to change the medium I work in for this project, hence why I am using modern techniques such a laser cutting combined with digital stitch, paint, graphite and ink. I am also incorporating video into my work something completely new for me, which is making it very exciting.

This is more of Shahid’s work, these are actually screen prints.

This is a piece that Shahid Parvez gave me.

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