September 27, 2003

Claiming romance with nature to be his motivating spirit and music and poetry as his inspiration, Mohammad Zafarullah sounds like the sensual painter he is, saysAhmad Fraz Khan

A conversation with Zafarullah reveals the conceptual clarity with which he approaches his work, and a look at his work convinces the visitor about his claim to artistic excellence. As one sat in front of him in a small studio in the basement of his home in Lahore and he started explaining the ideas behind his paintings, it felt as if the conversation could go on forever.

He started off by explaining how art becomes spiritual and the artist a repository of higher truth once he/she takes up the brush to say (paint) something. “Mother nature is my biggest inspiration and a running thread in all my work,” he claimed.

“It is largely because nature, owing to its vastness, has a different meaning for different people. Everyone looks at nature from his own personal lenses and comes up with a different perspective. People have been doing so for hundreds of years but have not been able to explore nature to its full potential as far as its different artistic facets are concerned.”

Zafarullah says that nature has different meanings to it at different times of the day; trees, the foliage, birds, shades of the changing sun, people walking in it, they all have a meaning for an artist and that’s what provides the ingredients for painting.

“Nature’s own characters are so strong that a sensitive person cannot miss them. Look at an ant; it has all the organs of a living being in that microscopic body. Its survival instinct becomes evident at the faintest of touches. How it takes food into soil and fulfils its duty nature has charged it with. All such things have different interpretations for different people and they have been trying to translate them on to the canvas for hundreds of year. “I am only one of those millions of people trying to interpret nature in a fresh and artistic way.”

And then the conversation moved on to the inspiration part. Zafarullah insists that music and poetry provide him the conceptual material with which to paint. Trying to create a link between an intangible musical content and tangible ideas that can appear on canvas, he said that music, unlike nature, did not directly influence paintings and the painter.

“There is no formula influence: one paints a special scene after listening to a particular raga. In that sense, it certainly exerts the most powerful indirect influence. This is because music essentially appeals to the instinctive and the intuitive, not the conscious. Though invention of language helped develop music by making transfer of knowledge much easier, but it still mainly remains out of the conscious world of language and logic. One proof of this is that even though music touches the inner self and creates feelings, these can rarely be expressed in words.

“In the same manner, music generates feelings and moods that help me paint my inner self at a particular point in time. But its impact is so strong that it can only be painted because language does not cover most of these areas of feelings and moods.”

Poetry, says Zafarullah, is another powerful influence on him and his work. Poets, like painters, see nature and life in their own personalized perspectives. “They give fresh ideas and help me see life from another angle, and then paint it. Poetry also substantiates my earlier contention about the vastness of nature. Poets, like painters, have been seeing and writing about life and nature for many centuries. But they still maintain originality and freshness in the writing of their ideas.

“This, to me, means that if one can hone one’s receiving ends and keep one’s mind open, nature always reveals new things and fresh perspectives. These inspire new ways of looking at old things.”

After the discussion about his inspirations and the scope of his work, Zafarullah led me to his adjoining studio to have a look at the end result. He presented his works as a practical demonstration of what he had just claimed: an amazing amalgamation of different inspirational themes. Nature indeed was present in the paintings with some of its dimensions.

Zafarullah is also involved in offering commercial services as an interior designer. But in his paintings, it is heartening to see that he has not let commercial influences creep into this purely artistic work. On the contrary, some of his commercial work also carries a strong artistic content.

With their bright colours, most of the artist’s paintings convey the message as clearly as he explains it verbally. “I always wanted to be expressive. It did not mean that I feared treading into abstractionism but being a little bit more direct has had its own list of advantages.”

True to this claim, Zafarullah’s abstract paintings have an element of subtle direct expression that beholds the onlooker’s gaze. “It is also mainly because I do not see things is greys. To me life is in black and white. No one likes a man who has no opinion and who sees grey in every situation. Life is essentially in black and white; there is a pair of everything — warm and cold, sacred and profane, male and female. Everything has a pair and that hardly leaves any space in between. This gives me the essential clarity of mind to make my kind of art.” When asked to explain the dominance of the female figure in all his paintings, Zafarullah was equally candid in suggesting reasons for it. “Nature is a female as I see it and it has a dominant role in all its manifestations. Giving birth is a female attribute, and this one reason alone places her at the centre of all natural activity. The nucleus of nature is the female. It is also because nature is a secret which reveals some of itself through women. This is precisely the reason for looking at the world through a feminine prism.

“It may also be because, being a man, I may be attracted to women in a big way. But that is an unconscious effect, if so. I am consciously aware of the fact that women have a central role to play in the scheme of nature and this is an intellectual conviction rather than an abstract effect of physical attraction.”

About his main medium of work being oil, Zafarullah said that sometimes an artist becomes comfortable with a certain medium. It is not any artistic compulsion. “But, oil for me is not a matter of individual comfort or preference, even though it gives me manoeuvrability of time and space. I cannot paint at a stretch for many hours. I do my work in segments. For this only oil gives me that kind of artistic margin.”

Talking about an apparent reference to the female bodies appearing in his works, he said that clothing these would deviate the artist in him from his art. “If I start weaving clothes around characters in my paintings, it would be an entirely new subject; colour, design and shape of clothes would be a totally new subject and that may take concentration away from my main subject. It would also not allow me to play with the figures and the feelings that I want them to emit.”

A teacher by profession, Zafarullah has been teaching at Hunar Kada for the last three years. He said that the teaching profession not only gave him fiscal space but also helped improve his artistic skills. “It has been a wonderful experience that also gives another sense of achievement. By teaching my students certain techniques and skills, I feel that I am leaving behind a legacy.”

Zafarullah is currently exhibiting his latest work at Ejaz Galleries in Lahore. The show will remain open till the end of September.