Upon entering the Momart Art Gallery in Karachi I am lost in the allegorical garden that bloomed there. There are flowering trees, shrubs and vines that are perfect for a variety of birds, big and small; humming birds that flit about, peacocks who strut  proudly, flying herons, and courting sparrows and thrushes who puff themselves up. There are flowers of every hue, shape and size; ones with broad petals or the tubular ones to attract nectar feeders; roses, petunias, honeysuckles, daisies, lilies, jasmines and others that attract bees, butterflies, and dragonflies…and here and there I spot a maiden or two resting her body, seemingly asleep peacefully on a bed of velvety grass. There are lovers in a grove holding hands, sitting quietly basking in each other’s presence and it seems that they too are taking in their magical surrounds.

I was witnessing the Karachi-based artist Muna Siddiqui’s ‘Eternal Bloom’ within her thirty-one exquisite paintings, each measuring 15 x 20 inches, that she was showing recently in a solo exhibition (December 4-15).

"In this series of watercolours I have tried to bring together all my years as a mosaic artist," she says. Siddiqui graduated from McGill University in the early 1990s and then studied life-drawing and water colours at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. She later went to Parson’s in NYC.

Siddiqui has held solo shows before, beginning with the one held back in 1993 at La Galerie Parchemine in Montreal, Canada, and she has participated in group shows as well, but her showings have been few and far between. This recent solo was held after a decade at the same gallery. Nevertheless, she has extensively researched on Mughal miniature art and also the illuminated and decorative arts of the Indian subcontinent. But unlike the gouache used in those miniatures, whereby the ratio of pigment to water is much higher, making it heavier and more opaque, she prefers to use watercolours for their transparent subtlety. "The medium gives me the precision of a brush strand. I can feel the curve and softness of a petal and can run my fingers through the downy feathers of a bird with paint and brush," she says, admitting that her eye-sight may have suffered in the process of working on these paintings for a period of two years.

The floral landscapes of ‘Eternal Bloom’ have an ethereal appeal, and they seem to be speaking of creation, life and death, as well as man’s relation with nature. Siddiqui has also painted angels with trumpets in a few of her works, which makes me wonder if its in reference to the Christian Eschatology of the trumpets used to serve as wake up calls to the sinners on Earth or to announce the glory of God, who is sending his angel with a loud trumpet call to sound from one end of the heavens to the other.

Was it Longfellow who had said that "Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man". Muna Siddiqui attempts to reveal this in her intricate renditions.