First death anniversary: Ghulam Rasul — courage to own his land

Symposium, retrospective exhibition of artist's work held at PNCA to mark the first anniversary of his death.

ISLAMABAD: Ghulam Rasul, or simply GR as he signed his canvasses, was one of those few painters of Pakistan who, in the words of late Safdar Mir, ‘had the courage to own his land’. At the symposium and retrospective exhibition of his work held at the Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) here on Thursday to mark the first anniversary of his death, admirers and friends remembered his sleepy landscapes that celebrate the eternal in the simple images of country life.

Ghulam Rasul (1945-2009) the integrity and value of whose art consisted in his refusal to follow the art fashions of his day and paint what inspired his creative talent the most, that is the endless panorama of wheat and mustard fields, buffaloes sunning under blue skies and banyan and birches standing alone and in rows, snow-clad mountains of Karakoram, Himalayas, Rakaposhi in Gilgit-Baltistan, Tirichmir in Chitral and simple brick and mud dwellings of our rural folk. Where many of his contemporaries would be indistinguishable among artists, his canvasses are immediately identifiable as his and speak for him and his country. The artist passed away on December 3, 2009.

Speakers at the symposium paid tributes to Ghulam Rasul as a distinguished teacher of art and as a man with many gentle and friendly attributes. Unlike the bohemian set artists tend to frame themselves into, GR maintained a casual simplicity in his appearance that was at once genuine and came natural to him.

He had no difficulty in being Ghulam Rasul.

Tauqir Nasir, the Director General of the PNCA, remembered his predecessor as someone whose work shows Pakistan as the country of a gentle populace as opposed to its image of an extremist society and haven of terrorists.

Musarrat Naheed Imam, Visual Arts Director at PNCA, recalled his desire to be remembered as the painter of the peoples’ joys and sorrows.

A number of diplomats based in Islamabad who admired his work and knew him personally spoke of their association with the painter. Among them was the Argentine Ambassador Rudolfo Martin Saravia. “I am proud of being one of his art lovers,” the ambassador said.

Art critique Arjumand Faisal said that the great artist painted landscape of the country with great love and affection from plains to mountains.

Participants of the symposium supported the demand of activist Fauzia Minallah that some picturesque road or park in Islamabad be named after him since GR spent a great part of his career as a painter, teacher and art administrator here, a city whose vanishing environs he has preserved in some of his memorable paintings.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 4^th, 2010.