SEE THE WORK OF MASTER ARTIST KHALID IQBAL ON 25 MARCH, UNICORN GALLERY Khalid Iqbal (Born 1929) Khalid Iqbal has always been a believer in representational painting and asserts that we have a different situation here and should not follow Western concepts of art unthinkingly because there is no similarity of attitudes. European art was a revolt against their old society and its value system, ‘whereas our modern painting is based on looking at reproductions’. ‘There is nothing of the spirit---It is opposite of revolt. It is a part of obedience,’ Khalid Iqbal paints through a process of acute observation and an understanding and feeling for his subject matter. He is one of the few painters who have been painting in Lahore for more than forty years. He left the Punjab University in the late sixties and joined the National College of Art as a Head of their Fine Arts Department. Over the years he has produced fewer portraits, but his landscapes have unfailingly given a lot of pleasure to the connoisseurs of painting. – Paintings at Alhamra ’50 years of Lahore Arts Council’ by Dr.Mussarat Hassan Khalid Iqbal’s influence on painting in Lahore has been profound. He has purged landscape painting of anecdote, sentimentality and academism, and given it its proper status. He is responsible for a whole school of landscape painters in Lahore who have slowly evolved their distinct styles. His chaste stylistic approach, the manner in which he maps-out his subject and allows individual elements to develop simultaneously, growing into a unified whole, have also influenced some of our abstract painters. This is, for example, evident in Shakir Ali’s criss-cross hatchings, lateral brush-strokes, and the general treatment of the picture-surface of his later works. – Pursuit of the real, ’Painting in Pakistan’ by Ijaz Ul Hassan Khalid Iqbal painted many excellent portraits and still lifes in the earlier part of his long career as an artist but for about two decades now, he has been devoting himself wholly to landscape painting. His special talent in this field won early recognition, for he recalls with pride that he won a prize for landscape painting at the Slade School of Art, London, in 1954, when he was a student there. His earliest education in art was at the Fine Arts Department of the Punjab University from where he obtained the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1949. The Head of the Department was Anna Molka Ahmed who encouraged her students to paint realistic landscapes of the villages around Lahore. But if one sees the landscapes painted by some of her earliest students of those days, such as Anwar Afzal, Naseem Anwar and Saeeda Karim, one finds that these are really detailed descriptions of rural life. They show the huts, the cattle, the carts, the villagers at work and the children at play, more as juxtaposition than as composition! Khalid rebelled against this anecdotal and minutely descriptive style of landscape painting. His later education at the Slade School of Art, 1952 to 1955, again was realistic but a simple, austere and undecorative kind of realism. The Head of the School was Sir William Coldstream who belonged to a group of artists called the “Euston Road Group”, which included Victor Pasmore, Claude Rogers and others. They avoided the mannerisms of modern art and painted everyday life with cool objectivity. On return from London in 1955, Khalid again joined the Fine Arts Department as a Senior Lecturer and very soon he developed a style of his own in landscape painting, which he practices to this day. - Landscape painters, ‘Painters of Pakistan’ by S.Amjad Ali
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:40:20 +0000
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