KATHMANDU: Three months ago, Canadian pop artist Robin Luoma came to Nepal, to help a non-profit organisation for its earthquake-related works. It had been two years she stopped creating artwork — “due to lack of inspiration”.

But soon after her arrival in Nepal, Luoma travelled to Kathmandu and Melamchi for the work, where she found her inspiration. The scenes she saw around her grabbed her attention and motivated her to create something with screen-printing.

“She found herself painting the bright orange colour of the marigold garlands and used triangles to represent the Himalayas. Nepal has brought back to life, her love of screen-printing and allowed the world to see Nepal through fresh eyes,” opines Marie Ange Sylvain-Holmgren, Creative Director of Image Ark gallery.

Within five weeks of travelling back and forth to Melamchi from Kathmandu, Luoma created paintings enough to put up an exhibition and Sylvain-Holmgren provided her with the space. Now artwork reflecting people of Nepal, their lifestyle and nature come alive in the artist’s works on display in the exhibition ‘Pop in Nepal’ that started from February 19 at the gallery in Patan.

She has used the technique of screen-printing on canvas using acrylic colour to create her paintings. In these paintings, she has made repetitive use of geometric patterns like triangles, circles, straight lines, and rectangles. They symbolise inspiration from Nepal — hills, mountains, people, and more.

Colours like parrot green, ink blue, red, pink, orange, yellow, sky blue, purple, et cetera are inspired by the colourful clothes of Nepali women, marigold flowers, plants and so on.

You get a refreshing feel watching the bright shades and repetitive geometric patterns.

In one of her paintings ‘Suns, Moons and Marigolds’, Luoma has repetitively used circular forms in orange, yellow, red and white hues symbolising the sun, moon, and marigold flower. She has brilliantly used circles within circles in different colours.

In another painting ‘Much’, she has created rectangles within a rectangle using hues of red, orange, blue, white and more. The rectangles are spread around the canvas, and the backdrop is painted in yellow all over except in the middle, coloured in white.

The exhibition is on till March 20.