Border artists

Amrit Kiran Singh loved the realistic portrait of a young and innocent looking woman he saw at his friend's place in Lahore. When his friend told him it was a portrait by Eqbal Mehndi, one of Pakistan's renowned artists, Singh, an art collector, visited Mehndi in Karachi and brought back a painting.

On his second visit to Pakistan this January, Singh, vice-president and Asia director, South Asia, Brown-Forman made it a point to meet Pakistani masters and bring them along with their art to India for an exhibition titled "Artfully Peaceful" under the Jack Daniel's foundation for art and culture.

"Lately there has been a lot of fashion and music exchange between the two countries, but art as the third component of culture was missing," says Singh.

As works by Gulgee, Eqbal Mehndi, Ijaz-ul-Hasan, Wahab Jaffer, Nahid Raza, Mashkoor Raza and Jamil Naqsh were displayed for two days at Hotel Park Plaza, the exhibition showed an interesting melange of a hosts of art forms "" abstract Islamic calligraphy, realistic portraits, modern art, expressionism.

Women seemed to be the central theme among the artists and each had their own reasons for the muse. In Nahid Raza's works the women were single and lonely, the background symbolic for men who dominate but "in my works" says Raza, "the woman's figure is all powerful and not an object".

Jamil Naqsh's work includes some nude portraits that could not be displayed in Pakistan. Eqbal Mehndi's almost photograph-like portraits of beautiful women in oil on wood, pen and ink on rough paper are, in the artist's own words, "so realistic there is nothing to say". Mehndi's realistic art is rarely seen nowadays with modern art and installations.

Calling himself an expressionist painter, Wahab Jaffer recalls taking to painting after collecting art when his industries were nationalised and he had nothing to do. Painting abstracts and semi-figurative forms in vivid colours, Jaffer feels "artists in Pakistan are still not free to paint a totally nude figure".

Old and frail Gulgee, Pakistan's most renowned artist, explains his abstract Islamic calligraphy infused with western art. The texture of his oil abstracts is thick, giving it an embossed look and Gulgee explains, "I paint wet on wet." His mosaic chip portraits painstakingly take a year to complete. Only Ijaz-ul-Hasan's works had strong political and social themes, though again cleverly restrained.

The artists, while chatting about art in India, were alarmed at the prices being fetched by even middle-level Indian artists. "Compared to their prices, our works are priced really low," says Nahid Raza.

Singh adds, "The work of Pakistani artists is brilliant and affordable. Gulgee and Naqsh's works are between Rs 10-25 lakh and Mehndi's portraits fetch Rs 5-15 lakh."

Other than the love for art, for Singh the exhibition was to ncrease the momentum of the people-to-people contact between the two countries. Singh hopes that their best will compete with the best in India.

"With the exposure in India you will see the prices of their works treble in a matter of 18 months," he predicts.