Irish painter Christy Brown, as quite a few before him, showed to the world that artists know how to see life eyeball-to-eyeball in adverse circumstances. Indeed, they are a special lot. They don’t get bogged down by debilitating diseases or unfavourable situations. In fact for them the dictum ‘difficulty induces growth’ works like a mantra.

Sajjad Ali lives in Bihar Colony near the Lyari area of Karachi. Everybody knows how uncertain life in that part of the city is. And yet there is an artist living there who has been painting, drawing and sketching for as long as he remembers. His sketches bring out the innocent side to beauty and his drawings uncover those facets of landscapes that an average artist fails to discover.

Sadly Ali’s health, particularly his hands, doesn’t permit him to move freely; therefore not many are aware of this gifted artist. What he does is that there are certain buyers who come to him every now and then and buy his artworks for personal collection or to sell them off in the market. He obliges them, as and when it happens, without thinking twice about his creative labour.

“I have always been interested in art. I started learning to paint from Ustad Khair Mohammad at Lea Market. Later on Usatd Qasim became my teacher. He taught me a lot of things about art. I think I was 14 years old then. I kept painting and fine-tuning my skill. Then came a time when I grew up to be reasonably known. People used to come to me to buy my stuff. My artworks were even put on display in exhibitions.

“Then one day, as fate would have it, an acquaintance of mine, who was a little impulsive, twisted my thumb. It hurt so bad that it made the thumb crooked. Later on, when I was 19 years old, I got this disease called rheumatoid arthritis. It damaged the flexible joints of my hand,” says Ali.

Despite what life has thrown at the artist, looking at his work, which might seem unfinished in the Aristotelian sense, gives a clear idea as to what the artist is capable of. His depiction of Balochistan’s rural areas (mind you he has never been there) is astounding. You can smell the soil in his artworks.

What cannot be left unmentioned here is Ali’s tribute to Indian film actress Vijayntimala. His portrayal of the woman in her heyday, with a slight smile on her cherubic face and a posture that can warm the cockles of many a heart, is, to use a phrase popularised by the Indian media, mind-blowing. Watching works of art like that you wonder how come artists such as Ali never get the right kind of patronage and don’t share the limelight with many of those who perhaps don’t deserve it.