It is heart-breaking, and at the same time, it feels good, like everything together makes it feel like being in a nightmare; a kind of daze — This is how Sufia Easel describes the feelings behind her art. It is a layered emotion drawn from personal struggles with anxiety and depression, a theme that runs quietly but powerfully through her work.

Sufia Easel graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the University of Development Alternative (UODA) in 2018. After working two jobs, she decided to fully focus on her passion: painting, and building a small business selling merchandise based on her artworks.

"I used to do a lot of pencil drawings before, mostly celebrity portraits," she shared. One of her most notable moments was when her fan art sketch of singer Shayan Chowdhury Arnob caught attention.

"Once, in Arnob's documentary 'Adhkhana Bhalo Chele Adha Mostaan', the director Abrar Athar contacted me," she said. "He told me that my fan art is beautiful and they want to use it as the thumbnail image for the Chorki documentary poster."

Easel happily agreed, marking an early milestone in sharing her work with a wider audience.

Today, watercolour is her primary medium. She prefers working with darker, moody themes — loneliness, memory, and emotional turbulence. "The theme I work with is usually dark or moody," she explained. "Like depressive mood...the various dark motifs that are in our surrounding environment."

In paintings like "Alone with Letters and Memories," she created a self-portrait standing in front of a wall filled with old memorabilia: diaries, letters, and envelopes.

"The inspiration was from the city... there, two things are very commonly seen — neon lights and rows of buildings. In that urban setting, people often sit alone at home, looking at old photo albums and memories," she said.

She also explored rural settings in her art — a painting with a boy reading a book by candlelight, another featuring herself and a rabbit under trees. "The light there is candlelight, not neon," she said, pointing out the different emotional tones she captures between urban and rural spaces.

Despite the emotional depth of her paintings, selling them has not always been easy.

"My paintings often take 100 to 150 hours to complete," she said. "Big artworks take a lot of time, very painstaking detail." Because of this, the pricing can be high, making it difficult for many to buy her original work.

"Many people might like the art but cannot afford it," she added.

To address this, Easel started selling merchandise — mugs, notebooks, tapestries, and canvas prints based on her original artwork. "I hope that since I have started releasing merchandise, everyone will be able to buy my art," she said.

Looking ahead, she has plans to improve further.

"I want to license my merchandise business," she shared. She is also interested in producing archival-quality giclée prints, so that people can own high-quality reproductions of her painstaking watercolour work without the cost barrier of an original.

Easel is clear-eyed about the challenges artists face in today's fast-changing world, especially with the rise of AI-generated art. She drew a sharp line between digital painting and AI generation.

"Digital painting has its charm; it needs to be done with a graphics tablet," she said. "But AI-generated art, I won't say that it's art. Art is something that requires specialised skills, thinking, and inspiration. Art is not generated; it is created."

She worries that serious artists will be unfairly side-lined if AI-generated works are treated the same as human-made art.

"It seems to me that AI is like many fashion design games...it cannot be placed in the category of real art," she added.

As for the future, Easel's plan is simple and honest — "I want to draw many more beautiful pictures in my own style, my own theme, my own colour," she expressed. "And one day, I hope to open my own studio."

For Sufia Easel, art is not about speed or shortcuts. It's about sitting with memories, with wounds, with moments of fragile sweetness — and patiently painting them into something that lasts.

Photo: Courtesy