March 27, 2004

Jamil Naqsh was born in Kairana on the bank of the River Jamuna in a family of Muslim landed gentry where, together with prayers and fasting, Persian and Urdu poetry, and classical music, pigeon and kite flying, chess and shikar were the preoccupation of the old and young alike. This was the most romantic region of the subcontinent, abounding in ancient temples, stupas and Mughal monuments, where Urdu ghazal and Hindi geet reached their zenith; where the sufi and yogi, following their different religious disciplines, shared a common beatific vision; and where Mughal and Rajput miniature painting flourished for centuries.

Then came Partition, and the birth of Pakistan, his new home. Jamil was not alone in this migration and uprooting. Everything was in a state of flux. Change was the order of the day — a world away from the stability and continuity of life in Kairana, where the passing centuries seemed to have affected no change in the way of life or culture. It was the end of Jamil’s age of innocence, growing up at the age of nine in a grim struggle for survival.

But was it? Lahore on the bank of the river Ravi had always rivalled Delhi and Agra in the splendour of its art and architecture and was home of the great painters, poets and novelists of the subcontinent. Its romantic association with Noor Jehan and Jehangir, Salim and Anarkali, its museum with a wealth of Mughal and Rajput paintings, its Lawrence Garden, the race course, and particularly the walled city with its old-world atmosphere, filled him with wondrous joy and determined his future’ vocation.

It provided him with the trinity of his symbols or significant forms: woman, pigeon and horse — woman as the most precious gift of the Divine Artificer to man; pigeon as a bird of freedom and romance; and, finally, horse as an embodiment of strength and grace and the legendary companion of man. In short, human soul in love and ecstasy! It was therefore natural for him to drift into Lahore’s Mayo School (now National College of Arts), and into the orbit of Ustad Haji Sharif, who made his own paint, paper and brush and copied the old masters meticulously in the age-old tradition.

Mayo School of Art was founded during the last century by the British and followed the British academic style or the Bengali revivalist tradition. Even though Amrita Sher-Gil had blazed a new trail in the 1930s and Zubeida Agha in the ’40s had introduced the latest concepts of Western art, it was left to Shakir Ali to change it drastically. Indeed to the ardent young men gathered around him in awe and admiration, Shakir Ali was a modern-day Socrates and Marco Polo rolled into one. He had visited the great centres of Western art, and his success fired the imagination of the younger painters in Pakistan.

Unlike his fellow students, Jamil was not taken by the master’s passion and advocacy of the contemporary Western art, which he decided was not for him. He had to go back to his own roots for inspiration and guidance. For him, art, though universal, stems from the soil and landscape of a country.

Jamil painted all things miniature, figurative and semi-abstract. He experimented with many a theme initially focusing on woman, pigeon and horse. Also calligraphy. And regardless of the theme or the medium, all his works reflect the discipline of the miniature artist. He has no preference for the medium of expression either. He is equally comfortable with oils, watercolour, pencil or crayon. Paper or canvas is all the same to him. He approaches surface as one would a new beginning.

Most eastern artists are said to paint with their ‘mind image’ and not directly from nature. This is true also of Jamil Naqsh, who goes one step further and, just as Michelangelo had no problem in releasing a figure from its stone prison by merely chipping away the outer trapping, Jamil simply stamps his total vision on the canvas without making any changes or alteration during his process of painting, his brush seldom going astray.

For Jamil, beauty must have an organised form, but not too regular or too similar. There must be slight deformations in the shape so that parts are not like the whole. Each element is repeated, every time a little differently, particularly when it comes to abstract art, for all abstract art is ‘fractal’, coming as it does from equations and nature. His treatments on canvas and on opaque washes with oil on paper are immediately recognizable as his signature textures. In order to make a significant contribution to the world of art he has to remain true to his own genius rooted in his own part of the world.