For him painting is like a prayer

There is no clutter of a surname. There is no continuum of a lineage. He is Yusuf. A man who lives like an ascetic. An artist who paints abstracts. A believer who owes it all to ‘nothing’; a nothing that is all pervasive, yet cannot be held in the eye. He owes it to that moment when his mother took her seventh born to a mosque, for her god lived there. But what the little child saw was not a form.  There was nothing to see. His god had no form; he was a feeling. He saw nothing, yet he believed.  He sought no explanation, he traced no beginnings, he found no end. And then he started painting...

Yusuf. That is all there is to his name. Even his passport says just that. There is no clutter of a surname. There is no continuum of a lineage. He is Yusuf. A man who lives like an ascetic. An artist who paints abstracts. A believer who owes it all to ‘nothing’; a nothing that is all pervasive, yet cannot be held in the eye. He owes it to that moment when his mother took her seventh born to a mosque, for her god lived there. But what the little child saw was not a form.  There was nothing to see. His god had no form; he was a feeling. He saw nothing, yet he believed.  He sought no explanation, he traced no beginnings, he found no end. And then he started painting, his lines taking cue from that nothingness. From that moment to now, his paintings are like his god – abstract, formless.

“It is like a prayer,” Yusuf begins the conversation, his faint voice drowning in the amplified invocation of the muezzin. Yusuf is talking about Gwalior, the family of traders in which he was born and his nine siblings. For generations, nobody in his family had touched colour and his mother was worried that her seventh born was nurturing the habits of the kings who could afford to paint in their ateliers. Every time she found him doodling in a corner she would worry what Yusuf would subsist on. Little did she know that one day her seventh born’s abstracts would be framed in gilt and hung in swank living rooms across the world.

But Yusuf never cared about the gilt. Not now. Not then when he was studying fine arts in Gwalior, not when he was doing black and beiges, not when he shunned the figuratives and the landscapes for the ‘lines’, not when he could not sell, not now when he sells for the price of gold. Yusuf never cared about the gilt. He is an ascetic.

He gets up at 4 in the morning, walks across the road to his studio and paints almost until midnight peeps through the slats. He eats little so that he could sleep little; his sleeping hours never stretch beyond four hours. “For the past 15 years I have been a frugal eater. That helps. I do not sleep for long which gives me more time to paint, to read…” That is all he does. “I do nothing else,” says Yusuf who calls his wife his greatest critic. “While I paint she sits there, she goes nowhere, she is always there where I am.” Before the nikaah he had told his betrothed, “If you want to eat malpua and kheer, think again about marrying me, I can only offer roti-chutney.” The shy bride opted for the minimal and has been happy ever since.
                                    
Over the years, Yusuf has risen above the mundane. For him it is all about seeing, not just seeing but about the way of seeing. “Our parents teach us how to eat, talk, dress, behave…. They never teach us how to see things,” he says, hurriedly adding about the book he is working on. “Yes, the book is about seeing. I want to teach people how to see. There is an honest way of seeing things. The moment that honesty begins to live in your eye, your perception changes,” Yusuf slips into philosophy which he read immensely as a  card holder of the Communist Party. He is no longer one, but he still loves reading philosophy and science.

Yusuf prefers to paint on paper. “The smooth surface is good to spread ink. Paper has its own colour and tones. It is linear, it is almost as if paper was made for my forms.” The surface could be anything, what matters is the art, the artistic moment. “I start with a blank canvas. I put a point or I draw and the canvas begins to speak. The dialogue begins.”

And this is no ordinary dialogue. It is a medium to reach a spiritual level where everything is chamatkar (miracle). “When I paint, nothing matters. It is a sublime moment where all pain, all hurt, all anger dissolves. Everything becomes irrelevant. Those hours are like a prayer, you are nothing else but a devout.”  

Yusuf thinks art is an extension of his genetic make-up. Look at his painting and you would know it is like a prayer…
 

Published Mail Today, December 2007

Contact: Preetivermalal@gmail.com