A number of female painters say that due to the restrictions imposed by the Taliban on their work, they cannot paint faces, they are only allowed to paint natural landscapes. However, face painting has been the source of income for some of these girls, and now they do it secretly and with fear in their […]
A number of female painters say that due to the restrictions imposed by the Taliban on their work, they cannot paint faces, they are only allowed to paint natural landscapes. However, face painting has been the source of income for some of these girls, and now they do it secretly and with fear in their homes.
Asma Mohammadi is one of the girls who graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts. She says that in the past she used to get a lot of commissions for face painting through her personal gallery and had a fair source of income, but now she is not allowed to do it in her gallery.
“Except for landscape and some other subjects, we are not allowed to paint faces. In the past, our gallery grew mostly due to face painting and we had an acceptable income, but now that our work is banned, our income is much less than before, and sometimes I paint some face orders personally at home.”, Asma said.
Marzia Mohmand is a girl who is learning this art in one of the painting courses after the closure of girls’ schools in order to escape from forced living at home.
She says: “I have been coming here for a year and learning painting, but unfortunately, due to restrictions, we are not taught to draw faces, while face painting is a popular and important style in the art of painting.”
A number of painting course trainers say that many students come to them to learn face painting, but due to the restrictions imposed by the Taliban on face painting, they have had to remove this style of painting from their training list.
In one of the painting courses, trainer Fatima Ahmadi says that there are many people interested in face painting, but in official places it is not legally allowed to draw faces or teach it, and due to the circumstances, we had to remove this style of work from our painting.
This is despite the fact that during the last two years, many restrictions have been imposed on women and girls in Afghanistan. A large number of them were deprived of the right to education, some were forced to stay at home and lost their duties. In terms of imposing restrictions on painting art training centers, drawing faces is prohibited and they can only deal with subjects such as landscape as well.
