“I was busy painting on the bank of the River Ravi when an elderly man encouragingly tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to carry on with my work,” says Mughees Riaz. “Three years later, when I saw a photograph of that very old man, at the entrance of Alhamra Art Gallery Lahore, I asked who he was. He was Ustad Allah Bakhsh, the legendary landscape painter of Pakistan.”

Riaz recalls this short and strange meeting with that old man and even today, he is not sure that who actually that person was! Interestingly enough, Riaz followed his advice and could never get away from the romance of the River Ravi and over the years, in his landscape painting, he has focused extensively on the river and its surroundings.

In a recent exhibition, ‘The Ravi Sutra’ at the Ejaz Gallery Lahore, the artist presented yet another series of landscape paintings showing the misty panorama of dust and dusk over the lazily flowing Ravi.

In his earlier work as well, the artist has been rendering buffalos, crows or hens to show the everlasting relationship of human beings with Mother Nature. But in this recent exhibition, all these symbols have been utilised with a subjectivity and concern for a poignant and innate depiction. The colours of his canvases are as diffused as always to represent the tranquil and silence over the whispering waters of the river.

Riaz is a modern realist in his approach and technique towards landscape painting as he tries to capture the effect of sunlight and the surrounding atmosphere; rather than the land or related elements objectively. The river with the playful sun over its waters, sand across the banks, the gypsy huts and domesticated animals in this hazy ambience is all that he cannot resist painting.

Along with the usual connotation of the elements, Mughees in this exhibition has come up with some new symbols in the form of camels, cranes and the cactus. The cactus and the crow have been symbols repeatedly used by Sadequain as well; however, his approach was more thematic and conceptual as compared to that of Mughees’s who, in a very realistic manner, tries to use these symbols as part of the painted atmosphere.

In these paintings, the foreground presents a space for the worldly life while the opacity of sunlight in the background suggests the spiritual or celestial aspect of life. With his subdued palette, the painter emphasises on the atmosphere that appeals to his senses and perception and not the spectacle that he looks at, when he paints it.

The landscape paintings in this exhibition, suggest the artist’s deep observation of the vacant space over the flowing river with nothing but playful light that creates a shimmering impact on the shiny surface of the river water. Most objects that he has arranged in the foreground or the lower part of the canvas attracts the onlooker’s eye with crisp colours, sharp lines and interlaced texture. Moving towards the background or the upper part of the canvas; there is the faded rendering of the distant trees or huts, on the other bank or the River in the mesmerising light of the dying sun.

The obsession of painting the Ravi and its surroundings in subdued light makes him ‘the Ravi specialist’. However, in this pursuit, he may have neglected many other areas that he should consider as a landscape painter.