Nineteen-year-old Robaba Mohammadi was born with a condition that has left her unable to walk or use her hands. The majority of her early life she would spend at home, unable to even attend school due to a lack of infrastructure or facilities for disabled people in Afghanistan.
But the many days of loneliness drove her to find her passion. The first time Mohammadi picked up a pencil, she used her foot, but she found that rather difficult. With the encouragement of her father, she tried using her mouth to learn how to paint. She says she had given up so many times in her early attempts to draw.
But she kept practicing, for hours every day, until she could draw a straight line and continued to learn from an art book given to her by a friend.
Her detailed charcoal drawings of people, objects, animals and pencil flowers gradually earned her fame by the age of 16.
Mohammadi has now launched her own arts centre to help train other aspiring artists with disabilities.
“One of my dreams was to have my own gallery to teach my students and now that dream has come true with the help of my family,” she said.
“There are about 40 students in the morning and in the afternoon classes. It is because we are new and things are just getting started. I mean it has been very difficult for me to start from scratch and get to this position.”
Mohammadi has created about 200 paintings in the last five years, focusing mainly on to such as feminism in Afghanistan and challenges faced by women.
Today, Mohammadi uses oil paints to portray the streets in Afghanistan and the country’s people. She also paints people with disabilities in bold colours and often in landscapes.
Her work is now sold and exhibited internationally, which helps proe the funds needed to keep her art centre open.
She also hopes to create a literacy course for people with disabilities who, like her, have been unable to attend school.
This report was edited by Al Jazeera NewsFeed’s Natalia Faisal.
Source: Al Jazeera
