Do you believe you are guided and protected by a superior force?
It is very difficult for me to say. I find myself in a conflict whether to believe so or not. At times, certain things happen, for instance when I create something that I cannot explain to myself, how it came, what guided it --- then for a moment, I do surrender to the idea of a force beyond. But after that moment has passed, logic takes over, because as a thinking person, I am enslaved by logic, and insist on seeing a proof of everything.
Do you believe you have a special mission or purpose in this life?
Most definitely. Life would be wasted if there was no specific mission, even if one is not necessarily defining it consciously and thinking about it intellectually. People without a mission melt away. I can see their demise. In my case, the mission is very clear: the day I cease to paint, I cease to be. That is the mission. It is what makes me live, what provides me a reason to be alive.
My coming to art though was not obvious from the beginning. It was a misfortune in disguise. I used to doodle as a child, which of course was not taken seriously as it was not something respectable in the kind of family and society I grew up in. But when I became ill and bed-ridden at the age of eight, and deafness had become permanent, my father became anxious about my education. He suddenly saw doodling and graphic arts as the way out. So he found an art school in Lahore for me to attend. And thus it began.
In my subsequent dedication to art, or what I see as the process of transformation of ideas into form, I faced countless challenges and issues.
One of them has had to do with the law of the markets and the age of hype we live in. They basically work against true creativity. An image gets attached to a particular artist who then has to live by it. It becomes his identity. Once a style has been invented it becomes a brand name. The reality though is that very quickly that style is outdated, it feels staled. But the artist is afraid to drop it and lose his comfortable popularity. Society around does not like to rethink who people are.
I have actually gone through this struggle over and over again. I would find a new shape, which would become a “brand” and soon enough, I would feel the need to move on to something else. But doing so meant losing a “constituency” that admired me for that invention.
So I had to pay a heavy price for it. The first time I felt the compulsion to do so was very hard; but that first time also helped me lose the fear of jumping into the unknown and following my conscience, moving ahead to the next invention.
Any time I would feel the material I was using had been exhausted I would change --- from painting to sculpture, from wood to glass then to bronze and so on. Of course I would at times come back to one of those modes of expression. But it would be a different experience. It is similar to those cultivating a land who abandon it for a while as it is dead from being used for too long. They venture out and when coming back a few years later, they find the land rejuvenated. But their relation to it and their way of sawing seeds is different, because it is informed by all the experiences and sights they have encountered along the way.
All my life has been about those cycles between inventions, transitions and transformations.
... contd.
