In Pakistan, the decade from 1985 to 1995 can be marked as the decade of annihilation and then resurrection from the sanctions that the dictator imposed during his 11-year rule from 1977 to 1988. Every genre of literary and visual expression suffered during this era and many exponents of art and literature, either compromised on their call of conscience or just left the country, only to breathe in the fresh air.

The impact of these years on art in Pakistan is categorised as the agitated, agonised and coined art and even the famous figurative artists started to paint landscapes and calligraphic patterns; and few simply avoided exhibiting their work in Pakistan.

During this time, Durre Waseem emerged as a dynamic artist as early as in her student years at the fine arts department of the Punjab University where, after completing her Master’s degree, she started teaching as well. Her presence at the department proved to be a live wire that could stimulate her students, colleagues and contemporary painters to paint profusely. All through those years one could find Waseem painting the matchless foliage of Lawrence Garden or the grandeur of Tollinton Market with crows sitting or flying around, as the traffic was not as hazardous as it is nowadays. Apart from this, she was found rendering portraits of her students and friends.

Durre Waseem covers the theme of street life in big cities in this show

Her brush was always vibrant, just like her soul, which was as restless as mercury. She influenced many painters around; to name a few, crows cry across the canvases as a witness to this reality. Unfortunately, the animated Waseem could not resist the stagnancy of the ’90s and left for the US in 1999. Since then, she has been painting the American people and landscape and sharing her knowledge and skills through teaching humanities as well. She also visited Europe and put the blue of the Venetian waters and ochre of old European architecture on her canvas.

After almost 20 years, Waseem decided to hold a show back in Lahore when she mounted landscapes and still-life paintings at Zulfi’s Gallery, Lahore. This exhibition was attended in large numbers by her friends, ex-students and art lovers who have always missed her presence at the local art scene.

However, the exhibition seems like a visual travelogue of an impatient tourist who is obsessed with capturing everything that appears to her sight, without missing anything. The brushstrokes, juxtaposed on the canvas, surface in semi-impressionistic technique with a touch of expressionistic vigour, as if a storyteller is telling an interesting story with fewer words and more kinesics and expressions; so the listeners could actually visualise and feel that thay are living through the narrated ambiance rather than just imagining it.

The artist wants her viewers to live through the painted ambiance, instead of just looking at it. She wants the onlooker to feel the dampness of the unfathomable layout of Venice and smell the oranges in a citrus field in California. Her brush steeps over the 100 spires of Prague city to represent its monumental architecture, and she replenishes the canvas with solid tones to escalate the Eiffel Tower in Paris on her relatively small canvas. This seems an experience of a time traveller who, with her colours, tries to visually narrate the past centuries and the associated hidden and unspoken anecdotes scrupulously.

Nevertheless, her brush stops lauding and starts whispering when it paints the fortification of the Lahore Fort or the vegetation of Lawrence Garden. She renders a potter with baked terra-cotta pots in an intentionally subtle manner, “lest they perish!”

She idealises working on the spot and capturing the ambiance in all its shades, and the pivotal reason for this might be her beloved teacher Zulqarnain Haider, who is a direct student and follower of Khalid Iqbal. In this regard, she belongs to the Khalid Iqbal school of landscape painting, but her technique is different from the modern realists.

However, in her early years, she has been attracted to the modern approach of Shakir Ali, the socially aware art of Nagori and the prolificacy of Sadequain.

Waseem believes in colour harmony, especially in her landscape paintings. For this purpose, she has developed a habit of mixing fresh colours on the same palette, without wiping off the earlier pigments, so that the new shades also absorb some tinges of their antecedent on the palette. This technique helps the artist in using the diffused earthen colours along with the greenish tinge to create a collective ambiance. Her hurried brushwork synthesises these shades in a perfect blend to create the atmosphere collectively rather than painting patches of non-integrated visual conflict.

However, as a matter of fact, the art circles and artist community of Pakistan need such individuals within the homeland in this era of reconstruction.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, March 13th, 2016