Hassan’s talent is discussed along with his paintings. “In art,” he says, “I am taken by common things. A plant dangling from a crevice can be breath-taking; a bud more solemn than a marble dome; a common gesture more monumental than pious truths.”

Travelling through the pages I see him inspired by things carrying no romance with them — tomatoes, papayas, mangoes. And then I come to a stop. I am in the thick of trees — sisham, anar, Himalyan oak, kikar, amaltas, jaman. Hassan informs us: “I have been doing landscapes or rather pictures of trees. All of them about the un-pampered common species on the roadside or in some neglected backyard. A visibly dead laburnum bursting into life with a riot of yellow showers, a grand old juniper dying next to a lake, an invincible wild beri tree with fresh shoots sprouting from limbs that were ruthlessly chopped the previous season …” He then talks about the social significance of all this. But at the moment I am in no mood to listen to this as I am under the spell of the trees. Unfortunately, we are living in a barren age in which the ancient relationship between man and nature has broken down. We now stand estranged from the trees who had been our best friends from time immemorial.

So it is heartening to find that when the trees in our land are under the constant threat of deforestation and nature is estranged from man, there is an artist who is in communion with the trees. “I cannot say I am not infatuated by nature,” he adds. “There cannot be a better companion in an estranged world.”

The book also recalls how the 1980s were very difficult times for Ijaz. It was during these years that he decided to devote all his time to painting. Recounting this experience, he says: “I am painting nature so that you can smell each plant and every landscape and recognise the species of each tree … Share the experience which each tree has gone through, the agony of its gnarled branches or the ecstasy of its majestic growth.”

What is admirable in particular is that Hassan remains faithful to the truth of the trees. The difficulty with modern painters is that in their love for abstraction they deprive things of what D.H. Lawrence calls their ‘thingness’. The trees, the shrubs, the flowers should appear as they actually are. If the painter has discovered some symbolic meaning in it let it come out. Ijaz is also aware of the symbolic significance of trees he is trying to paint. After all, in those very years he was involved in a political struggle, a fight for survival in the face of a cruel dictatorship. Under these circumstances the tree known as kikar appears to communicate to him something related to his own situation: “I find the sad agonised appearance of the kikar at one level symbolic of our trials and at another level expressive of our common nascent strength.”

There is also a series of his paintings under the title ‘Cling on to the tree and hope for spring’, a translation of a line from Iqbal — “Paiwasta reh shajar sai umid-i-bahar rakh”. Here the tree stands as a symbol of hope. Trees, and in general nature, serve for the artist as a refugee and inspiration. They give him courage to stand resolute and hope for the best.