OUT - SAM B. A Solo Exhibition by Shamsul Bahari.

At five am. in the morning I woke up and sat on my bed I felt peace after the head had been cleared of all the rattlings and the rumblings of the day before where i had handed over my 19 pieces of Artwork to the gallery for my Solo Exhibition. Peaceful in the fact that i have met my commitment towards having the show itself which I have worked on for the past eight months fron the moment I was offered a space in the gallery's busy calendar fo me to have my show which fell in August and the opening being on the day before my 70th. birthday and which also fell on the day of the Eid Mubarak when the Muslims all over the world celebrate the end of he Haj in Mecca. Since  the month of January i started to paint with body, my mind and my spirit having Katsushika Hokusai's words as my inspiration and the need to make an impact on the Art scene in my community as my  motivation.

"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive..." - Hokusai.

 I painted using acrylic on canvass and had I used oil it would not have been possible to create as many as 19 or 20 in 8 months and the apartment would not allow for such purpose. I would have preferred to paint in oil, however. The canvas are of tow sizes, 10 are of 3x3 feet qhile the other 10 3x4 feet in size  The hardest thing about  for me  about producing a body of works is what to paint, what subject matter. I solved that by giving up thinking about conformity to subject matter or style and just painted what my heart decides to paint. I poured paints on my canvases and allow for things to happen and nature took its course. My sometimes become free from inhibitions and my subconscious exposed itself into unique expressions. As a whole I enjoyed my eight months of painting my heart out witnessed only by my daughter who made it all happen by providing me with the space to work from. This was the first time I could say that i had worked from my own studio.