The way it was: Writers and sweating painters
Mian Ijaz Ul Hassan
Anarkali fell for a vagabond Mughal prince and was enclosed alive in a brick
wall. How awful! But I have often wondered why the father couldn’t keep his
son in place instead of picking on a harmless little girl
Writing is so much easier, at least much more comfortable than painting. Micheal
Angelo would lie on a wooden plank for hours, high up under the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel, painting frescoes with pigment dripping on his face, sometimes
getting into his eyes. He was back up there again the following day. Besides the
talent and effort of painting, just climbing up there required his old muscles
to be in good shape.
Sitting in a chair letting the imagination run wild is one thing, standing in
the smouldering sun addressing life is something else. Sniffing a flower while
balancing words is one thing, contrasting colours and comparing tones, drowned
in the smell of turpentine and sweat is another condition of existence.
Then there is the small matter of carrying the load around, an easel, a canvas,
a sketchbook, and tubes of paint, pastels, and drawing material etcetera
etcetera. What does a poet need? Literally nothing! Many of them are not even
literate. At best what they may need is a piece of paper and something to scrawl
with. The best poems, I am told are written on scraps of paper. The very best
are dashed off on discarded cigarette packets picked up from café floors, while
sipping tea at someone else’s expense. Who would give a labouring artist a cup
of tea, innocuously surveying a rural prospect or a façade in a street? The
ordeal of an artist who stands for hours riveted in one place like a statue is
no less fatiguing.
Painting is not just a matter of creativity; it is also something physical. Van
Gogh ate a lot of bread to keep himself strong. He wrote to Theo, his younger
brother, that he should do the same. I wonder why our people don’t eat enough
bread. And if there is not enough bread to go around, as the French Queen had
once wisely enquired, why can’t they eat cake. But jokes aside, she lost her
head for it.
Sadeqain and Moyene Najmi were the only painters who looked starved, but they
were tough because both compensated themselves with nourishing fluids. This is
the only similarity, which they shared. Moyene talked little and painted even
less after much application of thought. I can remember each one of the few
paintings he did, from his impressionistic Nila Gumbad and Qilla Gujjar Singh
paintings to his stylised later works like the Mughal Gardens and Anarkali —
not the famous Lahore street but the pretty naive girl who fell for a vagabond
Mughal prince and was as a consequence of his wilful parent’s orders enclosed
alive in a brick wall. How awful! It was perhaps a common occurrence in those
days. But I have often wondered why the father couldn’t keep his son in place
instead of picking on a harmless little girl.
Sadeqain on the contrary painted so profusely that I can only recall the ones I
liked best, ranging from drawings where crows are nesting and laying eggs on
human heads, to huge murals spanning the entire evolution of man. Sadeqain loved
to talk. He never ceased weaving yarns about himself and his work. It was best
to only listen while he talked.
I was once asked to interview him for the television and radio. It was the
simplest thing I have ever done in my life. I cannot recollect if I was given
the opportunity to introduce him. He just took off and went on at his own
leisurely pace, talking of this and that, narrating rather engaging episodes and
incidents which quite often fell to his benefit. He was smooth with words and
substantiated everything he said with a couplet — an irritating habit with
most other people. Frankly a couplet can often confound an average person about
what is fairly plain to him in simple prose. But Sadeqain had such a smooth
voice and manner of weaving one phrase with another that it would verge on
inducing stupor. In this particular engagement I was brought to myself when the
programme producer not so politely nudged me.
Sadeqain unlike Moyene painted feverishly, spasmodically with both hands and
often in a hurry without thought. He was so good with his line and could render
his familiar male and female types without blinking. Once in order to show off
his skill, he delineated his usual woman type in a matter of seconds. What made
the demonstration impressive was that he started at the top on a large sheet of
paper with the feet and then proceeded down from the ankles to the knees, to the
hips on to the navel, the breasts, and then finally down to the neck, the head
and the hair.
After he was finished he turned the sheet upside down for the audience to see
what he had almost disdainfully accomplished. Everyone applauded. It was a
brilliant performance of his great skill, which occasionally could stand in his
way. Having this easy facility he would often do things without reflection. He
was so fluent both with his words and line that I wonder if he ever stopped to
think things over, was ever inclined to speculate or pushed to conceptualise
what he espoused. I knew Sadeqain fairly well and considered him a friend but
there have been lots of things, which have remained unsaid.
Sadeqain was one of the best things, which could have happened to Pakistani
painting. He reasserted the importance of the human image and insisted on
declaiming the real issues of the time. Sadeqain’s best works express hope and
brotherhood of man. They are not based on a personal sense of loss, which is
characteristic of much of modern painting and literature. Most Pakistani
abstract painters, under the impetus of western modernism were taking a path,
which would have led to a cul de sac. They eschewed living issues and advocated
instead expression of private sufferings, escape into figments of their
individual imagination or sought fulfilment in transcendental aestheticism
divorced from meaning and the important ideas of their time.
But coming back to our present concern, it takes a lot of physical effort to
paint. The instruments of painting are themselves concrete and material, unlike
words, which are non-tangible. In a painting if an ounce of turpentine is used,
along with it goes a litre of sweat. One is of course not being dismissive of
the achievements of our poets in their clean shirts but simply bringing on
record what is so abundantly true that unlike the versifiers, painters have to
sweat for whatever they do.
Prof Ijaz-ul-Hassan is a painter, author and a political activist