Ijaz ul Hassan is a painter with multiple concerns. In the pursuit of which he has generated intense vigour and enthusiasm that has left those around him a trifle bewildered and surprised. He has led a vibrant life and in his endeavours he has not spared himself or others around him in his numerous tangible or abstract goals.
If we are to understand the impulse and the drive behind many of his accomplishments, it is important to trace the reasons that have motivated him to forge a distinctive identity for himself and his work. Closely integrated with the will to preserve his individual vision has been his awareness and adherence to a larger human identity that spans areas beyond himself and his immediate neighbourhood. The continuous struggle of man to uphold his dignity and espouse human aspirations has been the artist’s eternal theme and concern. His training and love for literature enabled him to locate symbols and metaphors in the complex patterns of life around him and to express his concerns through them. In fact throughout his painting career, Ijaz has used metaphors that in the simplest forms bring home to the viewer the meaning that he wanted to convey. These easily understandable symbols are an asset that Ijaz has frequently relied upon and used in his work.
These interests have freely mingled with imminent and nostalgic perceptions of life, nature, common sights and events to produce paintings reflecting his changing moods and circumstances – the imagery and innuendo, the intimacy and delicacy, the grandeur and spectacle, the bright rays of optimism and the sombre tones of despondency – in fact the whole range of his personal feelings that have governed his creative impulse and imagination during more than fifty years of his life as a painter.
In his exhibition brochure published on the eve of his retrospective exhibition at the Canvas gallery in Karachi in 2005 he says:
“Painting should come like leaves to a tree. I paint with the same instinctive urge. It comes naturally but not without unavoidable pain. In art I am taken by common things. A plant dangling from a crevice can be breathtaking; a bud more solemn than a marble dome; a common gesture more monumental than pious truths.
I cannot say I am not infatuated by nature. She unveils to the seduced only. There cannot be a better companion in an estranged world.
Common People bear suffering with courage and dignity. The bourgeois romantics make aesthetic capital of poverty and human
misery. Should a woman who has been raped have her image known in print? Delineating ill effects often separate them from the cause.
I love to be by myself but soon get weary and need to commune with others. Solitary confinement is like being in hell. When I communicate I like to have myself plainly understood, which is easier with words than in paint.
Life and nature are immensely absorbing. I am moved by events of our time. What is the purpose of life, I do not know. But one must try to remain sane and human. Painting partly helps me to achieve that. I pursue it because I have known it longer and best.”
Ijaz is a prolific ‘communicator’ and likes to express himself at length. During a private conversation with his daughter he said:
I evolved as a painter in constant movement, experimenting with expression – exploring how to express ideas and emotions through various techniques and modes of expression. I must be among the few painters who went from figurative to non-figurative and then back to figuration. As my involvement with my political activism increased I wanted to share my aesthetic fulfilment, ideas and concerns with the viewer – and as many as possible. Not just questions of sharing a mood or an aesthetic experience but also a question of addressing live issues that were affecting the lives of people and nations – the Vietnam war, the Palestine struggle, the struggle of the working class against the establishment. I could not look away from all this. How could any artist not address these questions?
In my painting you can see influences of the European landscape painters as well as Chinese landscapes. There are also inspirations drawn from Persian and Rajput Miniatures. In contemporary painting the Pop Art Movement that drew attention to trite, everyday things provided me a means of conveying my thoughts to the viewer. In my early years I loved Gauguin and his flora and fauna of Tahiti in stylised form and colours. In my middle years Cezanne helped me to restructure myself. I was very disenchanted at that time when I left St Martins and did not paint for two to three years. When I restarted Cezanne was of great value and I also enjoyed Kline, Rothko and Monet.”
Some of his childhood friends have an insight into his thoughts and concerns which is pertinent and interesting and this book would not be complete if I did not include their comments. His close friend Irfan
Husain a writer and author wrote in 1987:
“Artist, political activist, teacher, farmer: Ijaz ul Hassan is a man of many parts. But more than anything else, he is passionately committed to changing the status quo. And this commitment is visible in the colours, forms and symbols he uses in his canvases – a gnarled old jacaranda flowering in spring; an ‘amaltas’ laden with blindingly yellow blossoms in mid-summer; an opulent leaf almost visibly full of sap. All these images convey regrowth and hope in a hostile environment. Purely technical aesthetic problems divorced from objective reality have never appealed to him; instead, he has sought to find lessons for us in nature. A large number of his paintings were done in his own Lahore garden: often, window-frames remind viewers that beauty lies just a few yards away, if we only had the vision to perceive it.”
“…His work can be seen on two levels: on the obvious plane his paintings are at times starkly and achingly beautiful, at others there is a lushness of colours ad textures bordering on the sensual. But at the deeper level, the contrast between spring flowers in the foreground with a backdrop of somber trees contains a subliminal message: spring flowers bloom and die, but the ‘peepul’ tree will stand and cast its shade for scores of years. And it is this perception of a society in flux-and his rendering of it, that sets Ijaz apart from most of his contemporaries.”
“This restless and conscious search for beauty, meaning and self-expression makes Ijaz a very cerebral and articulate painter. He is always prepared to discuss his work and explain what he is trying to achieve. His education and wide reading have helped to give him a sense of history and an acute awareness of past and current trends in the art world.”
“But despite the adverse conditions under which he works, Ijaz has steadily forged ahead, evolving into one of the few genuine artists we have with a clear sense of his role in society. Talking to Ijaz, one gets the feeling of a human being closely attuned to his medium and his milieu; despite (or because) of his strong society commitment, his works reflect serenity born of his integration with his surroundings. Trees, flowers and shrubs are the idioms he has chosen to express himself, and they serve to remind us of the fundamental relationships between man and nature, man and society, and man and man.”
Ijaz in the past was criticised for stepping out of line with the conventional tenets of modernism. The art establishment found his work of early 70s hard to digest for their large media based images and social comments, because it was totally opposed to their concept of ‘art for arts sake’. Twenty years later the art world woke up to the merit of these paintings and realized in
the eighties and nineties, that nothing of this kind had been done before. But now, when he painted the much admired landscapes and murals based on nature, he was criticised for moving away from his art of ideas and social commentary.
To understand the painter Ijaz and his work one must embark on a logical and chronological journey that spans the different periods of his life. From the tentative but charming small paintings of the fifties to the meticulously worked still lifes of the sixties. From the aesthetic exploration of colour, simplest flat forms and surfaces to an affair with what he regarded as a ‘vivaciously disarming street art’. The effort opened up unforeseen possibilities for him. Venturing out beyond the nest of pure colour and form he was engaged by new challenges that face Pakistan and the Third World. His works of the early seventies boldly comments and conveys without hesitation crucial events and significant political ideas of the time.
The eighties, period of the second long martial law, was a period of withdrawal when he refrained from his explicit expression and adopted metaphors, images and other suggestive devices in order to express himself. It is during this period that Ijaz discovered the innate flamboyance and sheer joy of painting expansive canvases focusing on elements of nature, that express hope and survival, and emphasize her regenerative power and unwavering persistence to strive and grow. The fire and resistance of his earlier expressions thus gave way to an oft repeated message of beauty, hope and optimism.