Diversity With Style

Anila Zulfiqar has been a painter with an urge to develop and evolve as a painter of unique style. In this course, she has dipped her brush in colours that speak of her vision and point of view, from where she observes life around. Anila is a painter who likes to rely more on her visual memory and deep observation, instead of imitating what she sees. She started to paint canvases with dark and mysterious themes where surface textures were pivotal part of her paintings. However, with the passage of time, she started to play more with colours, and now she creates textures with her brush and paints. Her palette has embraced more vivid and flamboyant tinges, with a fresh feel of the palette.

Anila spent her childhood in the vast green fields of the Punjab plains where she might have observed the nature with all her warmth and sooth. Today, her canvases display the linkage of the artist with nature and environment around her whether it is a landscape or a cityscape.

Small frames, intricate weaving of the tiny brushstrokes and depth in perspective are the elements that are quite remarkable in her work. Anila is a kind of painter who does not work on the spot but even then; she is always keen on observing and then painting the atmosphere, its effects and influences that it casts on her. She tries to capture the changing effect of the light and fall within the impressionistic approach. However, her small-scale and intricate rendering shows her style closed to minimalism.

Recently, Anila has put on display her first solo show under the title of... In this show; one can see an array of small size frames that Anila has painted in a convoluted manner where she seems to be playing with the stylized perspective and visual compositions overwhelmed and based on the recollection, she keeps on observing in her everyday life. Specifically, she has made a colourful statement of the city she lives in, and about the streets, she wanders around. One can see the traditional architecture of Lahore that is still breathing almost its last in Anarkali, Gwalmandi and in the walled city. Since Anila is more prone to Anarkali, her tiny frames give an impression of all these places minimized in an assortment closed to the Japanese Ikebana.

In a couple of frames, Anila appears as she is experimenting with her painting technique especially in terms of visual depth created through the melted distortion of the objects, in a way that it feels like Salvador Dali is loitering behind the small canvas to cause some surrealistic aspirations in them.

Although, this assortment of frames carries diverse visual inspirations from modern-western art movements that are; impressionism, minimalism and Surrealism, even then the regional techniques regarding landscape painting are also prevalent. The colourful clothes, hanging alongside a railway track, or the round shapes of local huts with lush green vegetation around, gives these canvases a feeling of freshness as well as a touch of the native atmosphere. Therefore, Anila's work becomes a crucible of diverse styles and inspirations, but she controls it with such mastery that she looks successful in making all the diversities unified completely under the one visual idiom, in very small frames.

Design quality and compositional balance are other two very strong elements in these frames. Anila has balanced her paintings by composing the main objects along the horizon line in landscapes and towards the vanishing point in her cityscapes. Moreover, she has made the preeminent area more important by loosening her palette around with drips, drags and casual dabs of fresh and wet-looking colour.

It seems an unintentional journey of the artist to explore her own colours around her. Through this journey, Anila has discovered an atmosphere in the alleys of the metropolitan, which she can relate to her nostalgic possessions within her memories. That could be the one reason that all of Anila's paintings are quite suggestive in terms of colours, composition, and arrangement of objects while at the same time, these frames express a subjectivity regarding artist's own vision and recollection of her surroundings.

Anila, with her soft colours and strong compositions, tries to capture the scenic beauty that has etched in her memory. She amalgamates her perception with her vision before painting it on the canvas in the shaped of dabs and in tabs. In this way, one can find Anila closed to the technique of Zubeda Javed, who is the pioneer of this style in landscape. Although Anila is inspired by Zubeda's work, but she has made her paintings conversational by applying her individual colours and the distortion that shows her own emotional thrust.

Moreover, she has tried to document the visual heritage of Lahore. One cannot identify the actual place or spot in her paintings, but one can always relate that painting with a collective visual heritage that may have developed in our subconscious over the years.

Anila belongs to the new generation of Pakistani artist who has the potential of accepting modern challenges regarding present-day techniques and concepts without leaving behind the conventional painting.