Artist's Profile .....

   True art is the essence of one's being.
                    If it is sincere.
     It is the expression of one's inspiration, experience and level of skill.  Music and dance bring forth immediate and emotional response.  Literature and paintings propose a philosophy and provoke thought.
    All genuine art broadens the mind and
enriches the spirit and an artist MUST have
direct access to the community without  intermediaries or jurors.

    As a mere child I enjoyed shaping things with my hands with Play-Doh or clay or even a bar of soap.  One day my older brother showed me how to draw a human profile with numbers!  That began my enchantment with draftsmanship.        
    Every day after school I would spend hours copying Michelangelo, Da Vinci and murals from Ajanta and Ellora.   I was also very fortunate to have  one of the finest Indian artists,  M. K. Syed, for an uncle.  He encouraged me by praise and by giving me a huge cache of his own pastels and paints...my first!
    To this day I believe that solid drafting skills are the foundation of quality visual arts. With maturity and experience and the need for self-expression the artist veers off to an individual style but the fundamental skill of draftsmanship is always discernable.

    While still in high school I received the Royal Drawing Society London's Diploma and  First Prize for Figure Drawing.   Thrilling as this was, I still wanted to pursue a career in Medicine and studied for pre-med.   But a serious illness in my teens coupled with a top prize for Drawing in a national exhibition changed the course of my life.

   The intensity of exhilaration and sheer joy  
of creation  that I found in art could not be matched by my desire to be a neurosurgeon. 

   Then came exciting events....I completed a
painting and sculpture three-year Diploma
* Copyright: Zehra R. Post  * Website Creation:  Zehra R. Post  * Photography: Zehra R. Post
course in one year with Honors at the College of  Fine Arts,  won Italian Government's full scholarship for studies in Rome followed by a  full scholarship from Government of France for studies in Paris.
     All this was heady wine!  So here I stayed!

     In Rome I studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti, painted in the atelier of Antonio Corpora, learned fresco and restoration of paintings in the atelier of Professor Carlo Ferretti, and at the Istituto di Roma I studied mosaic and ceramics. 
     All along this time my respected friend and mentor was Professor Lionello Venturi, the pre-eminent European art historian and critic.
    Since then I have held thirteen "Solo" shows  in various parts of the world including USA, India, Europe, Middle East, the Philippines and Indonesia.   For a period of three years I  was the Art Director of the Presidential Award winning US magazine for India, "SPAN".    Somewhere along the way I abandoned the brush for the palette knife .  It was too tame to express what I felt within!   Most of my recent oils and acrylics, including my self portrait, have been painted with the palette knife.

    My works are in private collections around the world and in public collections of:  The Punjab Museum, Chandigarh;  Lalit Kala Akademi (National Gallery of Art) New Delhi; The Nehru Library, Manila;  Library, Aligarh University; Cabinet and Regional offices of CSIR (Center for Scientific and Industrial Research) New Delhi & Hyderabad;  US Information Agency, Washington DC;  and the archives of the Smithsonian Museums in Washington DC:  The Hirshhorn and The National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC.


     I am Zehra Rehmatulla Post.
I was  born in Hyderabad , India, educated in India and Europe, now living and working in Greater Washington DC area, USA.