ISLAMABAD, March 8: Bright sunrise, colourful mountains and clouded skies are the aspects of natural beauty characterised in Raja Changez Sultan’s new paintings that opened for display at Tanzara Gallery on Thursday.

The visitors while going by the display felt a sense of calm and silence projected by the theme and the breathtaking vivid colours.

“They are all so good,” said an art lover admiring the works of Raja Changez Sultan who has exhibited his art pieces extensively at home and abroad.

There are a few painters whose work is as instantly recognisable as that of Raja Changez Sultan who is also former director general of Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA).

His landscapes and figures are covered in mists and veils leaving much to the interpretation of the viewer.

Besides his series of The Divided Self and the Himalayan Odyssey, this exhibition also features the Wood Nymphs series of spirit-like figures in a landscape setting.

The Himalayan Odyssey is a symphony of towering snow-capped peaks of morning mist and overshadowed dells. It is a path illuminated by the reflections of sunlight on the snow filtering through the deep crevices between peaks of the Himalayas. The artist has been painting the Himalayan Series since 1991 and has painted over 4, 000 works till now.

It embodied the passion of unfathomable intensity, said Raja Changez Sultan on the eve of the opening of the exhibition explaining his paintings of dazzling colours and light, the integral part in its overall compositional quality.

“The scale at which the mountains exist makes you realize how humble man is. In that humbleness you admire their grace and find peace,” said Raja Changez Sultan.

While explaining The Divided Self, the artist said: “Is an introspective of different aspects of elements pulling a man forward and pushing him back, the positives and the negatives of a divided entity.”

His women are soft and supple, with voluptuous bodies and pale skins. But there is something eerie about their countenance, something which makes the viewer pause and contemplate on their somberness and their solemnity. The palette is more subdued, the fingers are subtler in their disposition and moods, and his pictures appear to take shape from within the canvas, sculpted onto the surface of the work.

Created by adding and subtracting thin layers of paint, there is an inherent unity in his work and that springs from his own solitary disposition.

The exhibition will continue till March 23.