Hafiza Khan carries culture, 'inclinations and instincts and aspirations' into her artwork

Hafiza Nilofar Khan's artwork essentially has no boundaries.

Khan, a Cape Girardeau resident who was born in Pakistan and raised in Bangladesh, has been painting and creating artwork for the past 15 years.

When she first met her husband, Carl Bloom, in the '90s, he was teaching art classes in Hawaii. Eventually, they became a couple and moved to Bangladesh together. Once in Bangladesh, Khan decided to try her hand at painting, using Bloom's leftover acrylics.

"At that time, I picked up his leftover acrylics and this and that because I was watching him and I was like, 'OK, I'll try my hand.' And I quickly, really very quickly, put my work and sold my work in the gallery there," Khan said.

One of the most common forms of paint in Khan's work is encaustic, a wax-based paint made of beeswax, resin and pigment. Encaustic paints achieve a textured feeling on canvas and can be combined with other types of paint to create varying textures and looks.

Artwork by Hafiza Nilofar Khan displayed July 23 at her Cape Girardeau home.Glenn Landberg

Typically, Khan gravitates toward creating mixed-media artwork with ephemeral ties, incorporating pieces of antique jewelry, old letters from her family, photos and more to add personal touches to her paintings. She has worked with printmaking, gelli printmaking and stencils, rust and other materials.

There really is no limit when it comes to what she adds to her pieces -- beads, wire, foil, marbles and nearly anything she can find she thinks might work with a certain piece to give it texture and vibrancy.

"Texture and feel, color and a message are a representation of your culture or your origin, even inclinations and instincts and aspirations and whatever you pick from your environment, immediate, local and global," she said. "Roots are also there, but you have to branch out."

Calling her paintings "suitcase art," Khan likes to make pieces small enough to fit in a suitcase so she can travel with the pieces and sell them while in Bangladesh. Rather than taking large pieces that would be difficult to transport, she takes smaller works and even some sets that can be combined and sold together to create a larger piece.

Although she began painting with acrylics, Khan has continued to branch out in the art world, using new techniques and painting materials she finds interesting.

Artwork by Hafiza Nilofar Khan displayed July 23 at her Cape Girardeau home.Glenn Landberg

Many of her pieces include Pbo oil-based paints, and she likes to do crossovers with different types of media, for instance using oil-based and encaustic paints to create certain aesthetics, such as a honeycomb look and texture.

She said she likes to combine oil-based paints, encaustic paints and other found pieces in her work. Recently she has become interested in working with alcohol ink, which creates a watercolor effect on a canvas.

Khan has a small desk studio space in her kitchen where she likes to work, creating pieces she calls "kitchen art." At times, she'll take her work outside and paint in her backyard. Although the space in her kitchen is limited, it allows a sense of outside connection and a peaceful place to work.

"When I'm alone, it's like meditation; I'm engrossed for hours," Khan said. "I don't need to eat, and I just need a quiet place, and I feel very blessed because I have two birdfeeders on two windows, and cardinals come here, all kinds of orange-breasted birds come here, and I had been planting some flowers here, too, so I just feel in tune with nature and my painting, and it's a relaxation."

In much of her work, Khan tries to incorporate a cultural feel and tether her work to her background and memories. She enjoys incorporating language into her pieces, including Arabic, English and Bangla (Bengali), the native language spoken in Bangladesh.

Art supplies rest in Hafiza Nilofar Khan's home studio July 23.Glenn Landberg

"I'm Muslim, but I am also Bangladeshi. Now, whether it's religion or it's culture or it's my adopted culture or my adopted country or my English, which has been with me since I was 5 when I started going to school ... that is a part of me, too," Khan said.

In most of her work, though, she maintains an abstract look.

"It's more fun to be abstract, too, because people keep guessing what it is, and I'm like, 'Whatever -- it is different things at different times to me, too,'" she said.

Coming to the United States has helped Khan flourish in her work, she said, because it created access to instructional DVDs, stores such as Hobby Lobby and Michaels and online shops such as Amazon.com that have all the art supplies she ever could need.

Khan also makes and sells jewelry and takes small wooden boxes and adds interesting components to the outside, such as fossils, stones and other textural pieces.

Hafiza Nilofar Khan poses for a photo near a wall with her artwork displayed July 23 at her Cape Girardeau home.Glenn Landberg

"I call my art very hybrid art, eclectic, pluricultural; those are the key words that ... to me can explain my work, because that's the kind of life I have chosen," Khan said.

In the future, Khan said she would like to return to Bangladesh to live near her mother and sell her artwork.

View Khan's work at society6.com/hafizanilofarkhan and at Free Spirit Studio in the Indie House in Cape Girardeau.

lyoung@semissourian.com

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