As a young and ambitious student of art, Kaleem Khan was obsessed with painting portraits. Moreover, being in Quetta and interaction with Saeed Akhtar and looking at the masterpieces of Bevan Petman, were good enough reasons for him to proceed with figurative paintings and portraitures. Therefore, he entered the National College of Arts (NCA) with a self-belief of becoming a portrait specialist and worked hard on this alluring genre until the day when the legendary Khalid Iqbal asked him to paint a landscape for a class assignment. From that day, owing to his own reawakening or due to Iqbal Shaib’s mesmerising persona, Kaleem Khan fell in love with landscape. This love affair propelled him to accomplish his final year thesis paintings on the streets, sights and sounds of Quetta, for which he took special permission from the NCA.

Today Khan is the only landscape painter who has defused his colour palette to match the dearth of colour in terrain and emptiness of the barren mountains of Balochistan. His brush seems to palpitate while applying colours on his intended paintings by dragging the purple-blue or yellowish-ochre on the coarse-surfaces of board or canvas.

The exhibition at the Royaat Gallery Lahore presented these unpleasantly dry-looking colours as masterly-rendered paintings to the foliage-greedy viewers of Lahore.

Kaleem Khan’s landscape of arid Balochistan are his real forte rather than commercialised portraits

The soil of Balochistan has produced many talented artists, including some bigwigs such as Jamal Shah, and Akram Dost Baloch who, coincidently were his classmates at the NCA. However, nobody dared to put the ochres and yellowish-greens together to cover the vastness of the mountains. There has been a practice of either realistic portraits or, on the contrary, the abstract or semi-abstract painting which addresses and contextualises thematic or conceptual aspects of life or culture in Balochistan.

Khan opted to put his brush on the canvas for dry shrubs, arid lands on the Mehardar, Chiltan and Takatu peaks of the Suleman mountain range of Quetta and its surroundings. The artist through his visual journey of almost 35 years has observed that these mountains are not as dry and barren as they appear for an occasional viewer. These peaks respond colourfully to the changing light of dawn, dusk and to every passing hour, against the sun — inspiring an impressionistic response in the artist, working on the spot.

The artist has captured the environmental texture of the province through his simple, yet matchless style of painting. He has exhibited his landscapes across Pakistan, as well as in Canada, China, Germany, India, Korea, Oman, the UK and the US.

Other than his first love of landscapes, Khan never ignored his instinctive obsession for portraits and figurative art. He presents horse riders, galloping through the dust and the innocent faces of Baloch women and girls, but in a hallucinogenic manner. One such portrait of a young innocent Baloch girl, riding a donkey has been surrounded with different visual elements related to the ancient Mehargarh civilisation. It reflects the artist’s keen interest in the visual history of his land.

The canvases with portraits or figures of native Baloch men, women and children can be divided into two main categories — realistic images of people busy in routine life and portraits of women and young girls.

Although these images involved many viewers empathetically, the admirers of Khan as a painter of thirsty land and mountains have expressed some reservations at the same time, about this approach since most of Quetta-based painters indulge in this style of painting. This difference between his signature and the adopted styles show that Khan is actually a painter of untrodden and arduous pathways and not of the popular, market-oriented and short-lived pictorial culture.

Nevertheless, the exhibition presented an exclusive assortment of canvases expressing the parched, forlorn and mountain-ringed lands of Balochistan. Khan’s palette is unparalleled in assimilating his vision with the canvas he paints.

The Royaat Art Gallery, Lahore, hosted the solo exhibition of Kaleem Khan from November 6 to November 24, 2016

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 1st, 2017