| To be born in Lahore is a sign of good fortune; to be able to paint your birthplace is a mark of special favour. Ghulam Mustafa is therefore twice blessed – first for having been born here forty-one years ago, in 1952, and secondly for having spent most of his productive years portraying the city he loves with an obviously filial devotion. |
| During his career since he graduated from the National College of Arts in 1974, Ghulam Mustafa has had the opportunity to travel as far west as the United States and as far east as China, but to anyone who looks at his canvases or his pastels, it is soon clear that his stimulus comes from the city of his birth. |
| In this solo exhibition of twenty-eight pictures, Ghulam Mustafa includes a wider range of work than he has attempted before. To those familiar with his vies of the old city, he resents different vistas, almost as though, having taken an unexpected turning through a dark street, he has stumbled across a new scene or composition. The foreground in such pictures is invariably dark, an arch or a window framing a light dazzling background. One gets the feeling that one is looking from an immediate past of old Lahore into its distant present. |
| In such pictures Ghulam Mustafa goes beyond the mere descriptive. To him, the posts and pans, buckets and debris of an artisan’s shop floors, as they lie in scattered disorder outside blackened doorways, echo the emptiness of the humdrum life of a level of society too often taken for granted. |
| There is an escape even from such bondage, and in a pastel of the kite flying Basant festival, he shows the way up via diagonal stairways to the rooftops of Lahore, where one emerges into a joyous scene showing multicolored kites aloft against a gray but not dampening sky. |
| Amongst the many monuments of Lahore which continue to inspire artists, the mosque of Wazir Khan provides Ghulam Mustafa with innumerable possibilities. From a balcony he catches sight of one of its bejeweled minarets and he balances a composition of it with a contrasting wooden column. He admires the façade and offsets the cubic polychrome tiled entrance with a striped umbrella. And by the time he reaches the Lahore Fort, his sense of mischief almost overcome his feel for history as he heaps cupola upon cupola until they reach the top of the fort walls. |
| A pastel and an oil painting of boats on the banks of the river yield an interesting insight into Ghulam Mustafa’s handling of both mediums, and his almost effortless facility with pastels. His views of rustic scenes – of buffaloes grazing at Shahdara early on a misty morning or chewing the cud in their manager – are sensitive deviations from the architectural formality of the city on the far side of the Ravi. |
| This gradual movement into nature and landscape is more evident in his haunting depictions of the areas around Islamabad and higher in the foothills of Murree. One particular picture catches perfectly the smoke from a Murree chimneypot merging into a mist which has almost but not quite enveloped towels left hanging out to dry. |
| But it is to Lahore that Ghulam Mustafa always returns, and never more confidently so than in this exhibition in which he has put on display two large panoramas. The first – a façade of a row of shops in Landa Bazaar – is graduated into different levels of composition. At the lowest is the street-level of hawkers and vendors attending to shoppers, while a Tonga Stands waiting for passengers, all of them watched by a bemused Pathan hawker. At a middle, in a continuous frieze, runs a green balcony decorated with repetitive figures. And above it at the uppermost level, is another running design of stone, catching glints of the orange afternoon light. |
| The second panorama – and by the far the most dramatic and audacious of Ghulam Mustafa’s works to date – is a view of the Lahore Fort walls, seen from below the Sheesh Mahal. The austerity of the walls is broken by the flock of pigeons fluttering in the sunlit foreground. It is a dynamic dramatic painting – a tribute to the city by one of its most admiring and admired painters – Ghulam Mustafa. |
