Visitors at the exhibition. — New Age photo.

Professor Farida Zaman’s seventh solo exhibition titled ‘Bound to the Soil’ is going on at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts featuring recently done paintings by the seasoned artist.
Though professor Zaman usually works with oil paintings in her own style, the ongoing exhibition displays 63 paintings predominately acrylic on canvas but also fashioning it in her own. Inspired by the Australian aboriginal art, she has also used tiny dots in some of these paintings.
The artist has also offered some new characters along with her characters of cats and crows to deliver messages. The ‘Bound to the Soil’ has, indeed, various other ideas entailed into it. ‘It has hopes for the nation; it also encompasses my childhood memories of journey by boats,’ professor Zaman told New Age.
So, water and fisher community are the central subject in this exhibition. To deal with the issues, Farida Zaman has created the character named Sufia and has presented the character in different ways.
Despite facing various odds, her character Sufia never appears pale or frustrated. Rather, her optimism of winning the odds and the zeal of her soul as well has been depicted through the compositions of the artist’s figurative paintings.
Sometimes, her emotion has been presented through the popular images created by professor Zaman such as crow. For instance, two crows give almost the same gestures sitting on the portrait of Sufia in the painting titled Expression 1.
Charming Sufia shows Sufia as a beautiful, strong woman in the field bursting with the colour various shades of red in a soothing and liberating ambience.
Fishing Net-8 seems to portray the net gathering grains of sunlight as it flows out to do its function; a different angle in capturing an integral part of rural life. 
Professor Farida Zaman’s painting ‘Rain’ feels like a circuitry of dots. She has also experimented with the texture of water in different ways in paintings like ‘Marshy Land-3’, which has been created with different shades of blue and white, aagain in Mud and water-2 predominated with red shades.
Even flowers appear as symbols in show. She has also used flowers to highlight a particular season like Joba (hibiscus) to signify summer.
Claiming art is the reflection her inner world, professor Zaman says, ‘It gives me consolation and inspiration. I want people to feel happy when they see my paintings.’