A life’s journey

The similarity is more in the spirit,says Naqsh recognised as Pakistan’s Modern Master whose solo exhibition titled ‘Jamil

Naqsh pays homage to Pablo Picasso’ will be held at the Cymroza Art Gallery till November 28 along with the Mumbai launch of a book of the same name compiling 80 drawings out of a corpus of 150,created over innumerable years.

The exhibition will consist of 21 oil paintings and 25 pencil-on-paper drawings. Most of the paintings are figurals rendered in the Cubist style.

“I admire Picasso because for him,surface and line weren’t important. He was only interested in colour and form,” says the 70-year-old. “The entire show is my homage to Picasso not because I’m influenced by him but because he gave all the 20th century artists the courage and the freedom to do whatever they wanted to do.”

And that is exactly what Naqsh did. As a boy,Naqsh left his home in Kairana in UP on the banks of Yamuna and settled in Karachi,Pakistan. He travelled to Chittagong,Kolkata,Kathmandu and Colombo absorbing the artistic traditions of these places with the sponge of his curiosity. “When I see a sight or a person my brain captures the image like how a camera would and it stays with me,” says Naqsh. Later,he trained with the master Miniaturist Mohammad Sharif.

It was in the ’60s that Naqsh began to draw pigeons,one of the three of his predominant subjects—pigeons,horses and women. The birds,used as a symbol of peace,were plucked from his childhood memories of pigeons strutting through the courtyard of his ancestral home. For many years,he used his childhood sweetheart Najmi Sura as a muse for his paintings.

“I’m content to draw variations of one idea,” says the artist. “I never bother about what people might say.”

Above all,Naqsh is known for his use of chiaroscuro— swathing his subjects in a ripple of shadows,or using the panoply to light to make his drawings pulsate with energy. As a young artist in Karachi,while contemplating on the work of French painter Pierre Bonnard,Naqsh drew and painted on newspapers. According to author Elizabeth Rogers,who’s written a biography on Naqsh,his fascination with paper can be rooted to the challenge of obliterating mistakes. Unlike the medium of canvas which permits over-painting,knife scraping,scratching and hacking,paper leaves little room for mistakes.

But what makes you come back for a second glimpse at Naqsh’s paintings is the niggling sense that they’re captured in a capsule of timelessness. Or,as Rogers puts it,“Naqsh’s muses are life,in all its poetic and altered manners,with their pleasure and pain and passion.”