Lahore at four in the morning in winter is haunted by the cold and dark stillness of the night. A vendor closes his tea stall, counts his earnings for the night before falling asleep behind the wooden shutters. Another hardworking flower-seller is heading home. A police constable is on the look to hitch a free ride off a passing motorist after his nightly duty. A prostitute is still kerb-crawling for the occasional client. A sleeping child is dreaming about a garden made of chocolates and candies. A student from a seminary has unlocked the door of a mosque and is preparing for the morning prayers. A painter wakes up to yet another day of his life.

We do not know about the lives of the other characters for there are many but the painter is Iqbal Hussain who wakes in the early hours of the morning and begins his day with exercising, followed by going out for a quick cup of tea somewhere around his neighbourhood. After these routine rituals, he begins to work, making some sketches, he picks up his canvases and resumes focus on his paintings — often in his studio, on the ground floor of his house on the periphery of Lahore’s famous Heera Mandi, the city’s red light district. Sometimes he works outdoors, in close proximity to his home or on the banks of the River Ravi, so that he can capture the early morning mist. After a break for breakfast, he returns to his studio where models wait to be sketched by the master. This artistic activity continues in different sessions with changing groups of models until early afternoon when he retires to his residential quarters to spend time with his family, watch television or socialize with friends. He retires early at around eight in the evening.

This is more or less a routine pattern, part of Hussain’s everyday life, reflecting the personality of a painter who is persistent in the pursuit of his ideas and ideals. His decision to continue living in the neighbourhood where he was born and brought up is an important element  while understanding him, both as an individual and an artist. His career as a painter depicts this sense of identity through an evolving relationship with his surroundings.

A painter’s connection to his roots is a complex issue. There are numerous examples of how different artists have dealt with their affinities to country, society or groups of people. Often they address issues of identity which are of national or global scale. But in more than one instance works based on such thematic concerns become riddled with cliché. The contrary remains true for Hussain who has contained himself to his immediate reality. His models are women from the red light district living not far from his studio-cum-home. For decades they have consumed his canvases, with made-up faces, gaudy clothing, surrounded by gloomy backdrops but transformed into symbols of beauty, pity and power.

The attempt to represent people from his neighbourhood lies in his longstanding affiliation that is apparent not only on his canvas but also in the way he talks about his subjects. Despite being recognised as one of the leading painters in Pakistan and even abroad, Hussain is part of his people who also serve as his muse.

He talks of his association to the women of Heera Mandi with an inherent fondness. Significant writers and artists who work with specific characters, frequently appearing in their works develop a similar relationship with their subjects. By this, they create their own world within their art form, be it in the novels of Gabriel García Márquez and Naguib Mahfouz or paintings of Alex Katz, Jamil Naqsh and others. In Hussain’s work, women, children and men are depicted in different settings yet they all have roots in a specific area and are from a single background.

Since his early training in Fine Arts from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Hussain has chosen realistic representation as his form of expression. His skill in delineating the shape of figures, details of landscape and the effect of atmosphere is matchless. He owes this inclination towards realistic rendering to his teacher and mentor Khalid Iqbal, a painter of Punjab’s landscapes. Having been tutored by Iqbal developed an artistic sensitivity and keenness  for detail in Hussain but soon after completing his education he walked another path, different and distinct from his teacher.

Along with painting usual figures, landscapes and cityscapes, Hussain has used the mirror – strategically placed in many of his compositions – as a recurring symbol in his art. Often a lonely woman or a group of them are looking at themselves or standing next to a mirror. The inclusion of the mirror may have been perhaps a formal necessity but it works akin to an (unconscious) metaphor/substitute for the painter who (like a mirror) is documenting the real lives of his subjects. The mirror indicates how the artist being a conscious member of society serves as the conscience for his surroundings. Hussain paints in order to invoke and provoke but he also explicitly draws our attention to the sensuous element of a woman’s beauty — a concept that is further conveyed through the depiction of human flesh. His act of portraying the female figure as a body is a direct contrast to the general notion of sin associated with women and their bodies.

Many among us have been defying the notion of immorality attached to a woman’s body and not only female artists but also their male counterparts have moved away from this perception. They, therefore, present and project female models being independent personalities, emblems of beauty or even symbols of desire. Hussain is a leading artist in this league since his work – in spite of the hostile reactions that it sometimes generates – has always been a celebration of women, an ode to their beauty and homage to their form.

However, whether you are acquainted with the world of art or reside outside of it, it is difficult to have a perpetually hedonistic approach towards female beauty. Even when the beauty of a woman is thoroughly impressive, expressing it in sheer physical detail is deemed inappropriate. It is usually assumed that the sensuous has to be expressed in some sublime way for maximum effect. Hussain (especially after his paintings were removed from public display at Alhamra in 1984) embarked on a crusade by representing marginalised women in their real form. These women – dancers or prostitutes – have never been accepted and admitted into the realm of high society (except on the occasion of weddings where they are called to perform mujra dances) but he made it possible for them to be admired through his canvases. His paintings collected and hung in homes of the rich and famous illustrate the miserable condition of these women who sell themselves for a living while residing in the poor and neglected neighbourhoods of our cities.

At an analytical level, it can be said (especially looking at works from his recent solo exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Islamabad — a kind of mini retrospective) that Hussain’s art has travelled from being a cause to a painter’s quest in rendering his subject on a sensuous level. Though Hussain’s women’s continue to appear on his canvas, girls gathered around dowry displays or women painted in dark and dingy settings, they are in essence the residue of the artists’ role as a representative of his people. In his latest work, both nude figures and women in garments against busy backgrounds indicate a shift in aesthetics.

Even though his models still originate from his own neighbourhood, they are not necessarily made as marks of identity of an underprivileged and outcast class. Now the content, concept or cause is replaced by the painter’s problem: how he must render or capture delicate features and desirable skin. In that respect Hussain reminds of French Impressionist Auguste Renoir who sought to depict light and colour but was more interested in painting the female flesh in its sensuousness.

This change in Hussain’s work has liberated him both as a painter and a person. It shows renewed enthusiasm, changed diction and new direction. With his intriguing compositions, he has also demonstrated an ease with his medium. Loosely painted features, causally drawn contours and urgently filled areas confirm the painters’ command of the subject and adapted material and technique.

In comparison to his larger works, his smaller canvases and drawings show how naked flesh is painted (something that is linked to the feeling of atmosphere in his landscapes, especially the early morning scenes). In these misty canvases, the impact of fog is masterfully rendered, a sensitivity that has its parallel in the depiction of female flesh as a glowing mass.

It appears that Hussain is moving towards a particular maturity revealing two facets to his art-making process: he is a painter first and projector for ideas and then, a  patron of his people. This change in painterly aesthetics and concept is revealed through a minor detail. In his earlier work, the mirror was present as a symbol but of late it has disappeared. This indicates that he has perhaps ceased to act as a commentator on societal injustices. Instead, he is content with the conditions because for him the painter’s role is to portray with honesty, passion and even lust so much so that at the end it is difficult to separate the maker from the model.

Perhaps as a sign of his passion to paint female body in its pristine glow, unperturbed by any outside agency including the painter’s own social ideology, he sets out to work early in the morning. As his day advances so does the level of his momentum before objects and ideas surrounding his subjects start colouring his creative imagination. When Hussain is done for the day and his rich, exuberant and exquisite art is transferred to the canvas, beauty is captured in its first, unpolluted flashes — naked, sensuous and inviting.