KARACHI, Oct 28: A solo art exhibition comprising some 20 oil-on-canvas paintings by the senior landscape painter Ghulam Rasul opens at the Canvas Gallery on Tuesday at 5pm.

Known for his deft strokes celebrating the natural beauty of the rural landscape and the seasons, Ghulam Rasul’s exhibition’s coming to town is a much-awaited and a major cultural event in Karachi.

Trained by the master landscape painter, Khalid Iqbal, and Anna Molka Ahmed in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Ghulam Rasul represents the second generation of those accomplished few whose works, even though they are close to real life, exemplify Pakistan’s modern art. From the colourful plains of Punjab to the towering heights of the Himalayas and the Karakorams, his brush has scaled it all through a myriad of seasons in a career spanning four very prolific decades. Today, hundreds of his canvases in private collections and museums across the world testify to the fact that there has never been a dull moment on his easel.

Ghulam Rasul sports a confident style of his own that comes from having imbibed, as it were, a living spirit that consistently breathes in the nature he paints, and on his canvases. Standing among his contemporaries like Sadequain, Ali Imam, Bashir Mirza, Zubeida Agha, Jamil Naqsh et al, and that too with a body of work comprising realistic landscapes, is no small feat. Each one of the hundreds of his ‘flat-technique’ canvases in real-life colours reflects the labour of love and passion that have gone into creating his own distinct, even if flexible, artistic idiom. As they say, all good art defies labelling.

The current body of work on display at Canvas brings together that life-long labour of love. Though most of the works are the artist’s recent creations over the past few years, they are varied enough to represent his chronological ascent from the Punjab to the Himalayan greens and mustards, and on to the Karakoram rusts and blues. A fascinating journey though nature as a contemporary living reality in his part of the country — a few hundred miles north and south of Islamabad — the exhibition leaves one fresh and rejuvenated.