February 15, 2008	Friday	Safar 07, 1429

KARACHI, Feb 14: Drawing is the mother of all visual arts. You can only distort a figure if you have the ability to draw it faithfully and have got your proportions right. It can be a fascinating experience leafing through the sketchbooks of artists. They show the germination and early development of ideas.

‘Let’s draw the line,’ an exhibition sponsored by a Pakistani bank, showcases the drawings of 22 well-known and not so known artists. Opened at Chawkandi on Feb 14 and jointly curated by Abdullah Syed, who is researching in Sydney, and his friend Roohi Ahmed, a faculty member of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, the exhibition is an offbeat art event that merits viewing.

The mediums used by the artists are varied. They include water colours, acrylics, charcoal, pastels and pencils. Some go back as far as two decades, while some are very recent. There is an interesting sketch of labourers at work, which the noted sculptress Rabia Zuberi had drawn while supervising the construction of the building of the Karachi School of Art about three decades ago. Rabia is just as strong in drawing as her youngest sister Hajra happens to be. Sadly, the latter is not represented in the exhibition. The curators could only manage to rope in the Karachi or Hyderabad-based artists, it seems.

Athar Jamal, the water colourist, is represented by three different works. The portrait of a Thari woman by a brush dipped in water colours is one, and then there is another done in pencil, but what is rare is his pen and ink sketch of a street scene in Lahore. He is not normally seen expressing himself in ink.

Some motifs which you see in Meher Afroz’s ‘Pindar’ series are there in the form of sketches.

The round flower, with two leaves, is to be found in a number of her prints and paintings. Also on display are her two fascinating poshak drawings.

Rasheed Arshad’s brush strokes in Japanese calligraphic style also stand out

in the collections. The versatile Nahid Raza can hardly be left behind. Her work in pen and ink, acrylic and graphite pencils are quite exciting. She had thrown open her studios to the two young curators, who had a hard time in selecting the right entries.

Riffat Alvi uses a very unusual medium – the smoke of candles – to give vent to her spiritual ideas. The small pieces on display have an imaginative title – ‘Fanaa.’

The two curators have also put up their own drawings at the exhibition. The one done by Roohi Ahmed shows the crumpled map of Pakistan, which is a commentary on the dismal state of the country. Instead of marking the longitude and latitude on the map she has put in years that matter in the history of the country: 1947, 1965, 1971, 1998 and 2007.

The show will continue till the 26th, with a break on election day and on the two Sundays that are to precede and follow.