Just when you thought that Dato’ Sharifah Fatimah Zubir was set on her intriguing abstract of interlocking shapes, she created a new template of viscous duller colours, more glacial and plodding in strokes held back by the additions of modelling paste, something which she saw in the works of A.D. Pirous, and when she first visited Petra (natural rock formations) in Jordan in 1990, there was a happy conjunction, and the palette knife came into play. This was from her first Touch The Earth series, another followed in 1996. The point is, she is inventive and bold, a quality one can see in her other later works and series. Dato’ Sharifah Fatimah Zubir graduated from the pioneering batch of fine art students from the Mara Institute of Technology (now a university) in 1971. She studied for her BFA at the Reading University, England, in 1973-1976, and her MFA at the Pratt Institute, New York, in 1976-1978, under the JDR III Fund fellowship. She won the Minor Award in the Malaysian Landscape competition in 1972 and the Young Contemporary Artists (Bakat Muda Sezaman) in 1981. In 1979, she won the coveted Major Award in the Salon Malaysia 1979. She also won 3rd Prize in the 2003 Biennial of Contemporary Painting of the Islamic World, Teheran. For her tremendous contributions, she was conferred a ‘Datoship’ by the Sultan of Kedah in 2006. Recent auctions locally and abroad (Hong Kong) saw her art prices soaring high.