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.”
