Whoa. Ok, clearly I had to include all of those closeups because, well, these details are fantastic! Flowers, figures, narratives… it’s all happening! This is the work of Sara Khan. She was born in England, raised in Pakistan, and now lives in Vancouver… that’s the super quick version of her life story. Now, how about the story behind these beautifully bizarre watercolor paintings from her series titled “Ubiquitous Follies”:

I am interested in the repulsion and beauty found in ordinary spaces and situations, and question the normalcy of the seemingly mundane matters in life. For example; how a man inside a woman leads to the birth of another human; turning the woman into a mound of soil in which a human germinates like a plant from a seed, and in the process disfigures the woman to the limits of possibility.

It is in dealing with these observations that I draw them out, to find a place for things that are neither here nor there. Slowly laying out translucent layers of watercolour, I work toward pronouncing some areas, while covering others entirely, almost decoratively as if to say “you didn’t belong, but now you do, or you did belong and now you don’t.” I leave some questions to chance, answer others more definitively, hovering somewhere between restraint and complete spontaneity. The idea is to develop a space or landscape with both extremes in it; the abhorrent and the fantastic. Coexisting to form one complete picture; thriving in the gray areas, it’s a subtle dance between “is it” and “is it not”. ~ Sara Khan, 2017

Whoa, again.