VIBRANT with a capital V and full of movement, as many as 39 paintings by senior landscape painter, Ghulam Rasul, opened at the World Bank building last week. To fill the dearth of art galleries in the Capital, World Bank has recently opened its doors to the Islamabad art circle to take advantage of its spacious entrance hall for visual art displays.
Huge canvasses depicting seasons and people, rural and urban life of the Potohar plateau, autumn in Islamabad and the Himalayan mountain range and the Northern Areas, are all subjects very close to GR’s heart. The subjects are spread around a few hundred miles north and south of Islamabad and show the artist’s chronological ascent from the Punjab to the Himalayas, and the Karakorams. The way he has portrayed this part of the country to the rest of the world, it won’t be incorrect to call Ghulam Rasul ‘a native Islooite’.
CALENDARS GALORE
The Japanese calendar exhibition is a much-awaited and major annual cultural event organized in the first week of January by the Embassy of Japan. Delayed due to other activities in the Capital, the more than 100 calendars of 2004 not only portray the socio-cultural development of Japan spread over centuries, but also exhibited the aesthetic sublimity of Japanese artists.
Traditional yet very modern, the calendars presented a window into the life and people of the country of the rising sun. Besides contemporary and traditional art, the calendars depicted colourful pictures and sketches of gardens, costumes, people, art, photography, pottery, sports, automobiles, wildlife, communication and historical places of Japan. Sent by different companies, the calendars attracted viewers through different subjects and mediums. As soon as it was announced that the calendars displayed in the exhibition will be distributed among the visitors, the enthusiastic crowd started filling in the lottery forms. Calendars showing traditional Japanese flower arrangements and those depicting seasons were in great demand.
CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD
An exhibition of the work of girls and boys no more than 10 or 11 years, representing different classes of society, was just as much thrilling and inspiring.
In her efforts to reach out to children from different socio-economic backgrounds, artist Fauzia Minnallah, who has been working with children of the Afghan refugee camp in Sector I-11 and a Christian colony, collected paintings done by children over the past three months and put them on exhibition at the Funkar Child Art Centre. The cold, wet weather did not dampen the enthusiasm of these children who stood in the rain to greet their guest, Ingeborg Briennes, the representative of UNESCO in Pakistan. Ms Briennes, active in the Islamabad cultural scene, has the credit of giving the ‘C’ in UNESCO its due importance. The lady braved the weather and came all the way because she “could not disappoint the children.”
A look at the creations of these little minds makes one wonder as to how they get influenced by their surroundings and what kind of feelings they have about life around them. The art piece done by Afghan boys mostly show helicopters, jets, school buildings while those done by Afghan girls invariably show homes. These are the children residing in Pakistan who have actually never seen the ugly ravages of war. But they are still heavily influenced by what is going on back in their country.
The paintings collected from the Christian colony in Islamabad mostly present the Pakistani flag and a cross. It is their desire to identify themselves with the country as a Pakistani, while the cross signifies their strong religious attachment. A painting by 10-year-old Fatima has a snow ‘woman’, standing in the snow with a broom. “Why is it always a snowman and never a snowwoman,” she questions. An eight-year-old girl with many sisters has drawn herself and her sisters in small boxes, but a huge box for their baby brother, whom she said has everything bigger in size than his sisters. It is strange how feelings of gender discrimination, peace, tolerance and minorities give voice to their feelings through this expression of art.
Art, Fauzia believes, is a luxury that not many children can afford in Pakistan. Art activities are nonexistent in schools for the children from the lower income group. It has always been relegated to a secondary status for children in our country, but even an hour-long art activity in a week can have countless benefits for children. Art education helps children realize their full potential in all areas of study, specially the ones in their formative elementary school years. “And because art requires self-discipline and confidence to succeed, it actually helps develop many types of intelligence that is necessary to experience and understand today’s complicated world,” Fauzia justifies.
VIBRANT with a capital V and full of movement, as many as 39 paintings by senior landscape painter, Ghulam Rasul, opened at the World Bank building last week. To fill the dearth of art galleries in the Capital, World Bank has recently opened its doors to the Islamabad art circle to take advantage of its spacious entrance hall for visual art displays.
