Yasmin Zaidi paints the pandemic

Yasmin Zaidi’s new artworks reflect on the COVID pandemic, isolation and grief

Yasmin Zaidi has begun to paint grief. It comes through in her two new works: one shows a young woman holding chrysanthemums in her arms, with graves behind; another has masked, socially distant people along a stairway (to heaven?). She asked her family what to name them, and got a number of replies: Viral Apartheid 2021, Loveliness and Loneliness. “I realised that everyone is feeling personally involved during this pandemic… They will give their own names to the paintings,” says the 70-year-old artist who paints flowers and people. Zaidi has lived across India — Firozpur Jhirka (in Haryana), JK Puram and JK Gram (in Rajasthan), Delhi and many more — where she worked as an educationalist through her life, mostly in administrative positions, though she trained as an English and Social Studies teacher. “I taught art sometimes because I was just able to,” says the hobbyist, whose home, when growing up, was filled with letters and pictures. Her father, Syed Ali Jawad Zaidi, was an Urdu poet and scholar, and her grandfather dabbled in art.