Tasaduq Sohail is a piquant character, a convincing story-teller and consummate artist who has lived a free and independent life untrammelled by kith or kin. His close companion who, for many years, lived in his London attic studio was a tomcat named Khan, who often appeared in his paintings.

Sohail was initially an Urdu short story writer who made his home in London where he lived for four decades. Working at numerous odd jobs to earn a meagre living, he attended evening classes at St. Martin’s School of Art, where his efforts were strongly encouraged by his teachers. Working at numerous odd jobs, he focused on painting and exhibited his work at weekends with other artists at Hyde Park.

According to Sohail, a palmist once read his hand and told him he would acquire fame at the age of 60; the rest is history. He was discovered by gallery directors in London, and his drawings were acquired by the British Museum. He travelled, was exhibited in the US and Scandinavia, and in Pakistan, his work became a popular feature of the Indus Gallery, with Ali Imam taking a proprietorial interest.

Celebrity palled after a time and he missed the carefree life of the Hyde Park painters. When Khan had lived his long life to the full, the artist decided to settle in Karachi, where he now lives quietly writing his surreal stories and painting his vision of the world.

Now showing his latest work at Chawkandi Art, Sohail was beaming. “It has taken me forty years to get here,” he said, referring to the gallery, and delighted by the ambience and professional handling of his work. The collection of 27 paintings on show rendered in oil on canvas and watercolour on paper is the result of two years’ work and each piece is quintessentially Sohail.

He retains his unique handling of the media while maintaining the symbolism and potency we have come to expect from the artist. In these paintings he has moved away from the small, gothic miniature style of previous shows. Working on larger surfaces, he refers to the earlier work by appearing to focusing on certain aspects.

One finds the fearsome, gargoyle-like faces suffused with suffering; mood changing idyllic, three-dimensional fantasies of beautiful lands where birds and animals reign supreme; and portraits that act as surfaces for his distinctive material qualities. Words are banished, there are no titles to offer hints of the artist’s intentions, and the work speaks volumes, evoking greater force in its ambivalence.

In these, Sohail’s most recent work, one finds a primitive exoticism evoking spontaneous cross-cultural referral; here the artist plumbs the mystery of mankind’s links to nature. One finds people and animals portrayed with equal importance.

In a painting hovering on abstraction, the viewer discovers a world where nudity—a symbol of innocence—is acceptable in a landscape where giant fish, winged creatures and man-sized creatures exist peacefully without fear. Sohail’s paintings are a reminder of a fact of life we had possibly forgotten until recent times: that nature is supreme and we cannot take its most ordinary aspects for granted.