He sketched souls, they turned tangible

Saeed Akhtar’s solo exhibition called Sketchbook is simply brilliant to say the least. Encompassing over 150 works on paper in graphite, pastel and charcoal, the collection is awe-inspiring for anyone who admires sketch work. The most interesting part is that these are not finished products, however they may seem to be. These are in fact initial drafts of oil paintings, and comprise his work spanning the last five years. For Saeed Akhtar, drawing from life has been an essential tool of exploration before he starts with his oil paintings. A lucid perception of the relationship of light with the structure and texture of the human form enables Akhtar to express with immediacy and freedom: the pictoral interpretation of the human spirit.
“I am inspired by anything beautiful,” says Akhtar. He jokes about it, “Women find men beautiful, I find women beautiful so I draw them.” But this is not true. Though his love for women’s beauty is apparent from his depiction of women in his work, there are men too, those with chiseled muscular bodies, curled up in fetus like positions, while there are men with turbans, their characters scrawled all over their faces. Saeed Akhtar also has an obsession with creating new shapes and challenges. Many of the figures he has painted, mostly those of women, have very long torso, long braids, even unnaturally long figures, as if they have been stretched from both ends. This is his love for “oblongitudes”, as a result of pushing boundaries.
“First I made a woman slightly longer than usual,” says Akhtar explaining as to why his love for lengths resulted in such figures on paper. “I kind of liked the result so I stretched her a bit more and then more, and more, and in the end, the figure grew so distorted that I loved it. It was like a new creation! And all the most challenging, because one must never lose the exact anatomy and the construct of the human body at the same time, while distorting the body too. I like challenges.”
Sketches are his initial drafts, which he later layers with oil colours. Akhtar explains that no artist ever wants to show his original draft work, for fear of viewers seeing their “mistakes” or flaws. But Akhtar is not scared. He says that it is more interesting for him to show his sketch work to art lovers so that they know what these same figures and faces would look like once they are filled with colour. “Colours are rich and beautiful, indicating several things and creating many more dimensions,” says Akhtar. “But these are important too. These are the skeletons of the human beings I paint.”