Veeda Ahmed, Fikr, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Veeda Ahmed, Enchanted Birds, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist.
Veeda Ahmed, Kukai and the lotus leaf, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.
Dr. Veeda Ahmed
Dr. Veeda Ahmed is a London-based artist. MFA (Gold Medalist) University of Punjab, Pakistan (1974), Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (1977), PhD, Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, London (2013).
Ahmed has trained under miniature and illumination masters, renowned geometers, icon painters, Japanese paper makers and artists. She pulls together all the threads of learning to weave a dialogue with traditional miniature painting, illumination, sacred geometry, and drawing.
Her forms move freely without boundaries as she draws from these knowledge pools to create a way of painting that blurs the lines between the traditional, representational, and contemporary.
Her palette is from Nature. Her paints, tools and materials come from plants, animals, insects, minerals from the earth. She incorporates the age-old process of grinding, purifying and levigating precious metals and minerals to make special pigments.
In her painting Ahmed’s gaze is tended upwards towards the boundless skies. Birds, like angels, soar and scale these freely. Wings, branches, the tree of life, and 365 moons feature prominently, using elements from her research of old philosophies.
Her work is held in private and public collections all over the world.