Born a painter, Maliha Azami Aga was exposed to literature and art by her father, while also having a creatively inclined mother. “Everything, even life itself, is art! We were pretty open to that as brothers and sisters,” she says.
Ali got her Masters in Fine Art (MFA) from the University of Punjab. “The head of the department at that time saw my work and said to me that if you were my daughter, I would advise you to take graphic design because you don’t need to learn how to paint.” After completing her MFA in Graphic Designing, she went on to do a second Masters from the University of Arts, Philadelphia, in Art Education, with a studio major in Painting.
She paints using acrylics as she discovered she was allergic to oils. Her drawings have subtle nuances of shades and colour as it is a different medium and requires a different handling altogether. “But with my acrylics I go overboard. I paint wildly and from the heart,” she says smilingly. Her own favourite painting is a small one of her father that she painted in 1997. “It took me a long time to paint him. I thought he would be easy to paint but he wasn’t. It’s still with me, hanging in my drawing room. I’ve gotten many offers from people who want to buy it, but I would never ever let go of it,” she says.
The day Aga put up her thesis for her final Masters degree, she was offered a teaching position at the University of Punjab, which she accepted. She loved teaching. We ask her to give us a quick first lesson, to which she says, the first thing an art student needs to do is to start thinking, then question, analyse, and read between the lines. She also says the key to create a great piece of art is sincerity.
She went onto being the principal of the College of Art and Design at the University of Punjab and that is when Ali showed the world her immense courage and strength, not as an artist, but as a human being.
She alleges that people at the university were indulging in academic fraud, and she spoke up against it and was subsequently removed as principal as she was seen as a threat. “I studied there first as a student, and then put in 30 years of teaching — and that was taken away from me for being honest. That came as a huge shock, but I fought against it until I realized those people were too powerful. People who had once been my students, who are now teachers, made me leave — that pain made me look at myself in a different light,” she tells us.
After this incident Aga started to introspect and made a choice not to let those people hold her back. “I am not going to be beaten down by people who don’t know better, I will always speak up against what’s wrong. I actually think it’s good that this happened to me, because what you take from pain makes you a stronger human being.”
But her story doesn’t end there; in fact one could say it had only just begun. “The very next day my professor of Drawing, Professor Zulqarnain Haider, who is a recluse, came to my door with a bunch of papers under his arm and pencils in a little bag and put his hand on my head, called me beta and said: “In logoon ko chor do, tum draw karo, that is what you’re meant to do.”
Two months down the road I realised Haider sahib was genuine in the way that he had advised me. I started these drawings, which developed over the course of a year and a half. I guess that is why they’re sad drawings, because it was catharsis. I was letting out my own grief and trying to understand other women, who may have been wronged in some other way,” she shares.
She arrived at a point where she had a collection of drawings sitting in her studio, so she decided to bring them to Karachi and exhibit them. “Karachi is perhaps more out there, more avant-garde, more eclectic. It has a different way of understanding and appreciating art,” she says.
The collection of paintings she exhibited was titled ‘Alchemy’. The drawings are made using basic graphite pencils, colour pencils, and pen. This particular collection of drawings is based on women revealing themselves through their faces, focussing particularly on the eyes.
“These women are all not necessarily talking about the pain but they are definitely feeling it. When you look around, there is more sadness than happiness. Happiness is transient, it’s fleeting, we find it and hold on to it, but it evades us. Most of the time, there is sadness. The collection is for people with eyes to see and minds to understand.”
Since she took a hiatus from painting during her teaching career, we were curious to know if her style of painting has changed over the years. Ali says, “It’s a journey, and on that journey I never close doors. I don’t restrict myself, which is why in my paintings and drawings, I’m a completely different person.”
Aga’s paintings are abstract, expressionistic and are evidently painted passionately, from the heart. She uses big, wild strokes of colour in her acrylic paintings and has created some moving pieces. However, the message she tries to communicate through her art is not always recognized. “Very few people understand these paintings, to them they are just strokes of colour. When the Lal Masjid incident happened in Islamabad, I made a painting called Capital Colour, in red, black and green — our capital was bathed in blood at that time. I wanted people to think about it from that aspect, but nobody did.”
“People don’t know who I am either. They think I’m this happy-go-lucky woman who dresses up and laughs a lot, but they don’t bother to go to a deeper place and try and understand. Very few make that effort, and that is exactly how it was at the university too,” she shares.
When asked which artists she grew up admiring, she answers, “I am absolutely in love with just about every artist. I was in Paris in October, so I went to The Louvre, and it just blew me away. I would go there and look at those beautiful Caravaggios and Rembrandts. I would look at a painting and move on, and then I would come back to it because I just never got enough of it.”
In the near future, Aga plans on holding another exhibition in Lahore, and also taking her work to New York and Washington. Her eyes light up: “New York is so vibrant, the tiny little galleries, the Metropolitan, which is just such a huge place and you can see history under one roof. Even just walking down the streets you can just feel that this city lives and breathes art,” she smiles.
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