ANUP PRAKASH

In one of her poems artist Keepa Maskey recalls her most cherished memories ? as a child in Nepal surrounded by dragonflies, butterflies and flowers, playing with brick dirt and water by herself as her mother cooked and her father gardened. "That was that back then, now it is the/memory that fills my eyes with tears," goes the poem.

She went to high school in India and then left for the US. After graduating with a degree in fine arts from Marymount Manhattan College, New York, she spent a decade living and working in the US before coming home to Kathmandu. "I just wasn't satisfied with the redundant lifestyle I was living", she says, "I came back for a better quality of life".

She is currently exhibiting a series of predominantly pastels in Kathmandu under the title 'Concepts in Balance' based on the theme of motherhood. She reveals that the series is dedicated not only to her own mother, but to everyone who can relate to the complex and intertwined identities that persist within the mother-daughter relationship.

She depicts in her paintings a personal journey based on her own experience with her mother - the transition from pregnancy to birth, a mother's devotion to her daughter and how this stops a mother from seeing reason when her child wants later to break free to create her own identity. She also depicts on a more positive note how the two are pulled together at every bend in life. Such is the nature of the mother-daughter bond.

Maskey's yearning for her childhood days inspires her work at every juncture. She used to watch her grandfather Krishna Bahadur Chitrakar, who was an artist himself, prepare panels of work for national events. She recalls daydreaming of colours and forms throughout her childhood, a tendency that still persists and which she demonstrates in the peculiar way she lays her ideas out on the canvas, always beginning her work with an oval.
This play on oval forms and the importance she pays to colour seems to be what sets her apart from the traditional forms of artwork in Nepal, that depict culture or scenery.

Sabhyata Timsina

Keepa Maskey's exhibition on 'Concepts in Balance on Motherhood' is being held at The Art Shop, Darbar Marg From 26 June - 2 July