Water is never just water in Shahanoor Mamun’s world. It falls as rain, moves as a river, settles into silence, or erupts into a storm. It carries memory and motion. Across paper and canvas, water becomes his language fluid, translucent, endlessly alive.
Today, Shahanoor Mamun stands as one of Bangladesh’s most committed nature watercolourists, an artist whose practice grows from close observation and quiet contemplation. His paintings do not simply depict landscapes or cityscapes; they listen. In his hands, nature breathes, Old Dhaka murmurs, and rivers carry stories older than time.
He recalls. “I didn’t know why I was drawing. There was no plan. It felt like an addiction, something I had to live.”
Born in 1986 in Dapunia village of Mymensingh, Shahanoor grew up beside the Sutia River, with the vast Brahmaputra flowing nearby. His childhood unfolds among marshlands and open skies, with boatmen singing, boats gliding and clouds shifting endlessly overhead. Long before art became a conscious pursuit, these experiences quietly shaped his artistic temperament.
The Brahmaputra leaves the deepest imprint. To Shahanoor, the river is a living presence, vast, unpredictable, and generous. As a schoolboy, he often slips away from classes to sit by the riverbank, watching life move in rhythm with water. With novice hands, he begins to draw what he sees and feels, without intention or explanation. That early compulsion unforced and intuitive remains the emotional core of his practice today.
A decisive moment comes with his visit to the Zainul Abedin Sangrahashala. The encounter opens a new horizon. He enrols at the Zainul Abedin Art School, studying for a year and learning foundational techniques under the guidance of Zainul Abedin Tarafdar. It is here that Dhaka Charukola enters his imagination as a destination. Encouraged steadily by his mother, Shahanoor begins preparing himself for formal art education.
After completing his SSC and HSC in Mymensingh, he enrolled in the Department of Ceramics at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka. Although trained in ceramic sculpture and drawn to the tactile possibilities of soil, watercolour remains his deepest passion. Even as a student, he frequents the Buriganga River, Waiz Ghat, and nearby landscapes, translating lived experiences into washes of colour.
Choosing ceramics over painting is an instinctive decision for Shahanoor, rooted in childhood fascination.
“There is a deep relationship between clay and watercolour. In ceramics, water determines the body and balance of clay just as water control defines balance in watercolour,” he explains.
Working with clay teaches him patience, structure, and restraint. Ceramic glazing, with its layering, translucency, and unpredictability, closely mirrors watercolour washes. Though trained as a ceramic artist, watercolour remains his primary medium, fluid, transparent, and emotionally charged.
For Shahanoor, watercolour is not simply a medium; it is a temperament. He chooses it for its honesty and refusal to be over-controlled. Transparency and translucency become emotional tools rather than technical effects.
Shahanoor’s paintings grow from emotion and illusion rather than surface realism. Silence and drama coexist naturally in his work, shaped by philosophical reflection.
His practice is grounded in flat wash techniques, paper soaked, pigment allowed to move freely. Wet and dry washes, glazing, and controlled brushstrokes appear intuitively, guided by mood and subject. Glazing plays a particularly important role, with thin translucent layers applied over dry washes to create depth and atmosphere. Often, a single confident stroke is enough; he knows when to stop.
His growing mastery of light and shadow is evident in depictions of torrential rain, rain-swallowed rivers, and hushed landscapes where silence dominates.
Though best known for watercolour, Shahanoor also works with ink, pen, charcoal, dry pastel, Chinese ink, acrylic, and oil. These media surfaces occasionally appear in his exhibitions, adding contrast and new dimensions to his largely water-driven narrative.
If nature offers Shahanoor solitude, Old Dhaka offers momentum. He paints the city with empathy and restraint, crowded alleys, tangled wires, rickshaws, tea stalls, horse carts, and ageing architecture rendered in muted tones.
Tati Bazar, Shakhari Bazaar, and Boro Katra recur in his works, softened by rain and time. Rather than dramatising chaos, Shahanoor creates authentic backdrops where urban life unfolds naturally.
Often, he says, “Every street has a memory, and I try to let the place speak.”
Rickshaw bells, car horns, voices, sunlight, rain, and the scent of old walls all enter his paintings at once. Through these layered sensory experiences, he expresses the history, labour, and civilisation embedded within the city. Rain speaks to Mamun more deeply than any other season. Watercolour and rain feel inseparable to him. From drizzling afternoons to torrential downpours, water dominates his visual language. Rivers overflow, streets glisten, skies soften. Water appears not merely as a subject, but as an emotional anchor.
This fascination culminates in exhibitions such as Jol Bindu, where water becomes both subject and metaphor, a continuous conversation between artist and environment.
Shahanoor’s landscapes often carry human presence, even when figures are absent. Boats wait at riverbanks. Tiny vessels drift on swollen waters. Villages sit quietly beneath changing skies.
In works like Shantal Village (Rajshahi)–2, he documents cultural rituals with sensitivity, a Santal wedding rendered with quiet respect. Other notable works include Rainy Evening at Old City, a mixed-media portrayal of rickshaw-filled streets; Sangu River (Bandarban), where acrylic brings vibrancy to the valley and water; Storm, depicting a solitary woman walking beside a lake; and Sundarbans, leading viewers into the stillness of the world’s largest mangrove forest.
Even intimate relationships find space in his practice. One painting, drawn from childhood memory, portrays the bond between mother and child: warmth, affection, and silent strength distilled into form.
Shahanoor’s artistic sensibility is shaped by an Austrian symbolist painter, Gustav Klimt’s symbolism, an Indian painter and draughtsman, Ganesh Pyne’s introspective depth, and above all, a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker, and draughtsman, Rembrandt’s command of light.
“Rembrandt taught me that light is the soul of a painting,” he says.
Like liquid gold, light enters Shahanoor’s paintings, emerging from darkness, energising form, and suggesting emotion beyond surface reality.
In 2008, a rain-inspired watercolour earned him an Honourable Mention Award at a group exhibition in Mymensingh. The recognition becomes a turning point, encouraging him to commit fully to watercolour.
Since then, he has participated in over twenty-six group exhibitions, workshops, and art camps. Alliance Française de Dhaka invited him for a solo exhibition in 2013. He maintains a long-standing professional relationship with Galleri Kaya, where three solo exhibitions have been held until 2020.
Mamun believes that sustaining an art practice in Bangladesh is inseparable from its political and cultural environment. A healthy art culture, he feels, requires stability, responsibility, and space to breathe. For him, every viewer approaches a painting through their own philosophy. In that sense, every viewer is a critic.
Above all, he believes art is a lifelong practice.
There are no shortcuts. Art is inseparable from life.
Mamun reflects.
Today, Shahanoor Mamun paints with the same quiet necessity that once drew him to riverbanks as a child. There is no urgency to impress, no desire for spectacle. His practice moves at the pace of water, patient, observant, and honest. Each work feels less like a statement and more like a pause, an invitation to slow down and notice what usually slips past unnoticed.
He believes art grows the way nature does: quietly, through repetition, discipline, and care. There are no shortcuts, only years of looking, listening, and learning to trust instinct. Even now, after decades of work, he approaches each sheet of paper with humility, aware that water will always have its own will.
In Shahanoor Mamun’s world, water does not merely move across paper. It remembers where it has been. It gathers light, carries loss and tenderness, and releases them slowly. And through it all, Mamun remains what he has always been: a listener, standing at the edge of a river, translating life as it flows.
