Sabir Nazar, Ranjha, 12 x 18 Inch, Watercolor on Paper, Figurative Painting, AC-SBNZ-001

BIOGRAPHY

I started painting watercolor half a century ago, when my grade 1 class teacher appreciated my drawings. I learnt drawing and watercolors from my father, who thought it would keep me busy, but later was disappointed when I left architecture in my third year to pursue fine arts at NCA.

My mother used to tell me stories of Pandavs, Samson and Delila, Shireen Khusrau, Rustam and Sehrab. In my early childhood, adjacent to our house was a Valmiki temple, where I saw theatre performances of Kalidas’s Shakuntala and Ramayan.

Three elements; watercolors, storytelling and theatre are a part of my paintings. Symbols made their way into my paintings during Zia’s period, when I tried to paint Sarmad Kashani in 1986. I realized painting the most dramatic and tragic moment of Sarmad asending the stairs of Jama mosque in Dehli couldn’t capture the existential crisis of Sarmad, nor did it explain Aurangzeb's motive to behead Sarmad. That was the moment I broke away completely from three dimensional works. I looked for meanings of objects and their transformation in a montage/placement or an image within an image. A cow, symbol of nourishment could be a symbol of motherland that sustains people. So when I placed a yellow leaf inside a cow’s milk udders, it became a symbol of barren land. This led me on to a journey of exploring archetypal images and symbols from our rich heritage

A visit to a local dhaba in Lahore also changed my outlook towards painting. At  a dhaba I visited, a self-taught artist painted images and one particularly caught my attention, a Ranjha like figure, playing a flute across a river, while a young women was painted on the opposite side of that river. River is a symbol of division of the class difference between Ranjha and Heer. Flute is a symbol of true words…that captivates the soul of Heer. Panj peer (five senses) blessed him.

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