Dr Ajaz Anwar is simultaneously in love with Lahore and water colour painting, and the two find expression in his excellent works depicting the walled city
Lahore is the gem of Punjab – a city rich in cuisine and culture, enchanting people and an eventful history. The walled city of Lahore is lying as a maze of narrow passages within its thirteen gates, with countless anecdotes in its small-brick architecture, and tranquillity in its ambiance.
The pigeons’ dens on the rooftops seem capturing the changing seasons while the azure sky, stretched over this city appears as a cosmic dome. Once, not that long ago, when the winter gave way to spring, Lahore celebrated with Basant – and the colourful, dainty kites looked like playful enchanters against the tranquillity of the vast blue.
This atmosphere has forced many creative people to pen poetry, to sing songs and to execute captivating paintings. Dr Ajaz Anwar has a passion for architecture, but he is in love with water colour painting. With a PhD in Muslim Architecture from Turkey, he has visually documented the culture, the heritage and the festivities of Lahore through his incomparable water colours. With a deliberate effort, he tries to record the traditional architecture of the walled city. The sky in his paintings is often dabbled with the fresh shades of variegated kites flying over the architectural labyrinths of the old city. Ajaz Anwar amalgamated his love for architecture and his passion for painting in a way, that has become his own signature style. In 1997, he was awarded the Pride of Performance.
Ajaz Anwar’s earliest exposure to painting experience was under Aslam Minhas at the Government College, Lahore – his alma mater. He is a water-colourist, who has captured the street-culture of the old city of Lahore and the grimy appearance of the traditional buildings which only let the sunlight fall from the top, at no less than 90 degrees. This quality of the streets allows this painter to represent light through bits and dabs of water-based pigments, soaked in the white of paper.
Anwar’s inexhaustible approach in rendering the sights and sounds of Lahore’s old city has made him an observer with open eyes and an absorbing heart. Therefore, he looks at this city with empathy and concern; he inhales the smell of the old city architecture before rendering it in thin layers of water colour.
Anwar’s inexhaustible approach in rendering the sights and sounds of Lahore’s old city has made him an observer with open eyes and an absorbing heart. Therefore, he looks at this city with empathy and concern; he inhales the smell of the old city architecture before rendering it in thin layers of water colour. In this process, Ajaz unleashes his emotional associations with the alleys; where he has spent his childhood and has roamed in his youth, as a spectator as well as an inhabitant of the town.
Few of his representations have the nostalgic quality where he has painted the buildings and places of this city he has been associated with since his childhood. This feature has distinguished Ajaz Anwar’s cityscapes from that of the colonial or the East India Company artists. Undoubtedly, they were the pioneer painters who first captured the architecture, culture and anthropological patterns of this city with all the technicalities of the western realism that they had brought to the sub-continent. However, the Company painters were looking at this city with an alienated sensitivity as they did not belong to this soil or culture. The Company paintings could be presented as the visual documents of this area with an interesting yet objective approach. Later, when the local artists worked on the same subject-matter, their approach was very idiosyncratic as well as subjective towards painting the ambiance and the social patterns of their abode. Thus, cityscapes of Naseem H Qazi have a different taste as compared to the work of Anna Molka Ahmad, who was attracted to the apparent merits of architecture and rituals of this land, while Qazi painted her village Rasulnagar or Lahore with all the emotional and individual indulgence.
In other words, what he has been seeing with his bulging eyes and recording in his head, under the long grey-white and then completely white locks, merges and splits over and across the water colour sheets in diverse shades or colours, and substantiates as a corporeal visual of Ajaz’s insight.
Ajaz Anwar is the ‘Nannha’ (a kid, in local parlance) of Lahore who has seen these alleys while riding a bicycle, or roaming around aimlessly. He has grown up with the city and has memorised all the changes in his perceived version of seen reality. Many of his frames display the architecture of important buildings that do not exist in present, or have been demolished for the expansion of the city or roads. He has been visiting his selected spots for painting regularly. This attitude has helped him in his unique technique.
In an interview with Ashfaq Rasheed in 2010 (published in Art in Pakistan: Traditions and Trends, Dialogues and Essays) he defines his technique of painting: “I visit to my selected spots frequently, make sketches there and take photographs from different angles at different times and in different seasons. The master composition is made in the form of a large drawing. From it, the undesired elements of the spot are eliminated and other aspects from elsewhere or from imagination included. In this way, a new version is given to the spot that emphasised the particular building – giving the message that it’s worthy of being saved.”
In other words, what he has been seeing with his bulging eyes and recording in his head, under the long grey-white and then completely white locks, merges and splits over and across the watercolour sheets in diverse shades or colours; and substantiates as a corporeal visual of Ajaz’s insight. His paintings are not only the illustrated evidence of the Lahore city, but are the frames where you can listen to the breeze softly blowing across or the noise of motorcycles and rickshaws, or you can feel the strides of individuals, walking briskly through these narrow and shady streets.
