DRIBBLING​ WITH RUMINATIONS

 

A very dear friend of mine Dr. Afridi who resides in USA and used to come to Kohat where he came to live in his native village Babri Banda. While in Pakistan he was a regular visitor to the Dhoda Golf Club in Kohat. This was when I was stationed at Kohat. We played golf regularly, an ardent golfer and a gentleman he is. Since those days we are connected via email exchanging mails. He visited my Blog a few days back and suggested that I should rename my Blog which I named MINDLESS to change it to MINDFULNESS! Why I named it mindless is for discussion for another day. I respect Doctor Sahib and agreed with him and as I approved his comment I also immediately changed the title to MINDFULNESS. So much, for the power of reasoning and perception. We all have our minds, which at one point or the other sways me like a pendulum. And when you have a pen in your hand so much can happen. As I said earlier in my Blog let it go. I like what another friend Khushnood Lashari Sahib also commented – “Excellent. As Wordsworth said, “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” So today again while I was thinking about abstract painting I was submerged once again in deep thoughts. I texted few lines to two of my very dear friends and decided that to be the start point of my next Blog which I have named DRIBBLING WITH RUMINATIONS. So here it is.

 

DRIBBLING WITH RUMINATIONS

It all started when on the behest of my neighbour General Abid who requested me to make for him a couple of abstract paintings for his living room. I have never painted one so far. So I took up the challenge. He gave me a couple of photos to paint. As I sat and saw those two pictures I did not want to copy them. I started thinking and for last two days, I saw how these and so many more abstracts were painted. The more I studied them, the more I got immersed and was spellbound by the rapturous eloquence and acceleration of colours which artists had created. I always thought abstract was an easy thing to make. Not now definitely. I know I can transfer to a large extent what I am thinking about the configuration and structure of the final form and what I want to create. But I am a bit apprehensive and yet to start painting. There is uneasiness and cloudiness in my mind as to how and what would be the final shape of the art and its colour combinations, which bears the resemblance to what is in my mind. The abstractness of the art seems so extreme and mere thought of non-representational form has filled me with uncontrollable lust and passion of leaving the pen and picking up the brush. It is like sexual attraction with both forms of an exhibition; of the pen as well as the brush. In one which is not visible, it can only be read and the other may not be describable to the last detail but can only be seen. Within the splash of colours there lays the image in my mind; imperfect yet by no means incomplete. There is uneasiness within my own self. There is this palpitation of heart and a tensed feeling of how my first abstract painting will actually come out to be. It is like the first kiss and not actually the first. An unseen tremble and shake of the leaf. Dribbling with ruminations has raised its sails. There is a gust and surge of the wind, which has filled the sails, which is in front of me in the form of a canvas. Flat, plain showing no upheaval so far. Waiting to be electrified and illuminated. The rudder is in my control. The direction will be set and rest with the combination of colours and more colours until my eyes know what I am looking at to be perfect to give away at the vehemence of my thoughts. The trajectory and orientation will be the memento for future evolutions. I am not a student of art, and I cannot express the art of expressionism. I have not read or studied art any time in my life. I just pick my brush like I do my pen and start transferring the strands of my thoughts. I have self-trained myself. I am far away from being anywhere near to being an artist. But what pleases me the most is what I paint. I do not follow the rules and sequence of painting, but I do gradually, in the end, reach there. Sabir Nazar a friend and an inspiration once remarked on my painting that I did a good job on a lighthouse I painted and put on Facebook. When I told him that I needed guidance from a trained painter, he strictly forbade me and said something, which has stuck in my mind since then. He said whatever you do, good or bad is your work and your prized possessions, you need not take any lessons but prepare yourself with practice. That day was the beginning of my unending trail of all kinds of paintings. My bent of mind is fixated in the colour of planets and stars, big and small and collision of meteors and the debris of these in deep outer space leaving a dust forming patterns and kaleidoscope of colours, which are beyond my comprehension. Thanks to the continual and uninterrupted voyage of science into cosmos, which has barely, touched the edge of the fringes of deep dark space so far that we have begun to know what lies out there so far. The single most facet which drives me to paint is to get into this puzzle of nature and let my head spin to visualise the light of thousands of years reaching us in our minuscule planet earth. We are in present time yet also thousands of light years into the past which is present now in 2016.