Noor Mahnun Mohamed: Interview

by Carmen Nge


In the bygone era before snapshots and professional studio portraits, famous figureheads and dolled-up dignitaries, pompous politicians and coiffed capitalists purchased posterity through the laborious process of portraiture. Artists sketched and painted while these men and women sat for them for hours. In our very own Central Market artists’ bazaar, portraits are painted on a daily basis but no-one sits for the artist—they give him their photos as reference instead. There is no denying that the human preoccupation with self-likeness has not diminished though artists’ desire to paint them may have dwindled. Noor Mahnun Mohamed, a Malaysian artist of Kelantanese descent, has resuscitated an old tradition of painting people but with an invigorating psychological depth and a visual style that has been praised for its simplicity and meticulousness.


The human figure has a prominent place in your work. What is your attraction to the human form?

I really like the Renaissance artists. Before I studied art, I was also a student of architecture and I developed a deep interest in the humanist tradition.


You say you like the Renaissance artists but you have a tendency to use flat perspective in your paintings. Don’t you see this as a form of rebellion against the more classical Western art tradition?

I sometimes adopt a more conventional sense of perspective in my work but I do like seeing things from strange angles; this for me is what leads to a sense of pictorial depth. I find it easier to manipulate the composition with flat perspective because the objects can be asymmetric and this is much more interesting than just having them point towards one perspective. For me composition takes place from a more realist point of view, meaning, I copy nature but I don’t imitate it.


I’ve noticed that colour and composition are paramount in your work. Do you often begin the painting process with these 2 considerations in mind? Can you give us some idea of how you work--the process of your painting?

I usually begin with an image that I think might be interesting to put in another situation or a room. After I bring these two different points together, I sketch it out on small grid and I play around with the size for a bit before enlarging it onto a larger grid. It’s just line drawing at this point. I always focus on the composition first. Colour comes later because the colour that you mix on the palette is usually not what appears on canvas because so much depends on what colour is beside it. I then decide if I want cool or warm tones but I tend to work with a blue and green palette.


Why the prominence of portraiture in your recent work?

It is an exercise. For my subjects, it is exciting, a novelty. Nowadays people take more photos. But they are still curious about how people see them. When you take photos of yourself, you do it not because you do not know how you look like but because you are curious about how you look like to yourself. Some people actually don’t like how they look in their paintings but that is because it is not how they see themselves but how I see them. Not everyone realizes this.


In an interview you once said that it is important to create distance between the painted figures and the viewer, and that buffer zones are necessary. Do you still feel this way?

Well, I don’t just feel this way about art but also about real life. A lot of it depends on the viewer because the eye does not impose buffer zones of course, but I want figures to inhabit their own worlds and thereby have a sense of estrangement from us. But this is a subconscious development. I don’t consciously create figures that reside in their own worlds; only later do I see it when I look retrospectively. My new works are more people friendly. Before the figures used to be more mysterious, now they are just paintings of people I know, my friends, my parents when they were young. This is because I meet so many people and I keep moving around and my past is in boxes. I think my past is also very much the present. At the moment, the way I see my parents, for instance, is I also how I see my past and the memories I hold.


In what way do you feel you have evolved as an artist/painter since returning from Germany in late 1997?

When I painted in Germany I was a student and I had the luxury of huge studios. It’s not the same here but I do feel at home in Malaysia. The buffer zones seem to be losing themselves here.


Why this increasing sense of familiarity rather than estrangement with your painting subjects?

I think I am getting old therefore I’m more people friendly. (Laughs)

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Noor Mahnun Mohamed’s solo exhibition will be on at Valentine Willie until 3 March, 2005