ISLAMABAD, Sept 25: It was after a long time that a painter had come to town from Lahore to hold the Dialogue on Art at the PNCA on Wednesday.

Ijazul Hassan is an artist who delights in drawing the Keekar (acacia, that he said was brought by the British from Africa to serve as a shield against the desert, for keeping the railway track intact from Lahore to Karachi) and Amaltas (tabular plant cassia fistula) because they are a symbol of “resistance”, of living and growing against odds.

He gave the audience the evening’s worth with his artistically crafted, almost philosophic, discourse on painting as a vehicle of political activism, aesthetics (which he felt could not be separated from thought) and the urge of the artist to relate to the times.

Also a well-known art academician, critic and teacher, Ijaz had been associated with the National College of Arts, Lahore from 1966 to 1975. He is an MA in English from Government College Lahore and has also studied at Cambridge, and at the St. Martin’s School of Art in London (But as a painter “I felt so miserable at the art school that I just left it after two years.” he said). He gave you a story of his artistic journey through 35 transparencies of his various paintings from 1957.

Here you find still life from early surroundings around the home he visited in Quetta, to a nearby mosque (simple straight lines and quiet colours), to an abstract formation of old rug. The journey develops to men and women asking for not only freedom of speech but also freedom in, as it were, a totality of experience. These were the Vietnam days, and Mai Lai Massacre becomes the distinct metaphor of one of his canvases. Green revolution of the Mexican wheat is mocked at by its non- availability in the hungry figures around it.

Modern Western women are juxtaposed against the rifle butt placed on the head of a calm Vietnamese woman, who was to be shot soon after. One also sees him drawing from common film posters. There was the jungli berri (wild berry) cut at various places, and yet growing again from the same places, and more, that gave him hope, as he said, in the days of Ziaul Haq’s martial law. There was the yellowish rebirth in branches. Then there was the old pomegranate tree; light coming from some of the leaves, although very thin but bringing hope for the artist. “Keekar to me was the symbol of resistance. It absorbed all the deprivations and the sadness, which the artist equated with the national calamities. Yet, it survived; and so gave hope to the artist. So was amaltas; it was flowering in the worst of Lahore heat, in fact was blossoming”.

He talked of him sketching in Simla, where he had gone as part of a Saarc group many years ago, and where he had to see all the time around him because people had asked him not to sketch because there were so many bears around. There was the cage with a parrot, “like our own self-created fears, how seemingly easy to break, how difficult to actualize.” But, Ijaz said, “I am an incorrigible optimist, and quotes Iqbal: pivasta rah shajar say umeed-i-bahar rakh. And indeed this relationship with the tree, with the leaf, with the light sprinkling through some of its branches in a darkened evening, is the only hope of the artist.

His journey to the USA makes him paint the essence of seasons, which are so distinct, unlike in our surroundings where winter and atumn may be side by side. There are the simple snow studded houses and scenery from around Kentucky, New York, Maine and a number of other, especially on the East coast.

The Chinese painters also fascinate him; one of whom he quotes as saying that colour was a matter of imagination. He points to some colours that may not be there in some Chinese paintings but you see them there.

Ijaz said that he found tremendous drama in common, everyday things. He also talked of indolence,” the very essence of creativity.” At times, he said, he did not paint for days. He may not paint for days.” I see an object every day but one day; I notice that it reaches out to me. Then you paint on and on from the same spring. Something must happen to me to paint,” he told his dialogue-partners.

Prof Ijaz spoke of the sad state of art criticism in Pakistan. He thought, at best, it was English oriented. “People would talk about literature and poetry in Urdu, but on art in English all the time. Appearing to be dismissive of traditions of art criticism in Pakistan, he later explained to this correspondent that what he meant was that there should be books on art criticism in Urdu also.

Ijaz thought that it was difficult to separate ideology (of all kinds) from art, and thought it was the greatest fascism not to allow the other person to have his say. He also criticized modernism, which tried to create uniformity in thought. He gave the example of a group of artists in 1954-55 whose avant-garde exhibition in New York could not be held a second time because they were seen to be challenging the establishment seriously. Ijaz said he was not a poet (he was an athlete in school days!) but he was greatly inspired when he read Sahir Ludhyanvi.— Mufti Jamiluddin Ahmad