Biography
Pakistani painter Jamil Naqsh is known for his paintings of women, pigeons, and horses. Naqsh was born to an affluent Muslim family in 1939 in Kairana on the banks of the River Jumna, India. His father, Abdul Basit, was a cultured landlord and an amateur traditional miniature painter, keenly interested in poetry, music, sports, and hunting. After the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, Naqsh moved to Karachi with his family.
Naqsh joined the Mayo School of Arts, Lahore, to learn miniature painting with Haji Mohammad Sharif (1889–1988) and studied with him for two years but did not pursue his diploma. Naqsh credited Sharif for instilling the detailing skill and patience of rendering in his paintings. After a few years of training and starting his artistic career, Naqsh embarked on a journey to visit historical and artistic sites in South Asia. In 1963, he returned to Pakistan and joined the Lintas advertising agency, where he established himself as a reputable designer. He was known as an outstanding illustrator and showed remarkable intuition for what he described as "balance" in design. He worked in the advertising business for ten years. Naqsh was also the co-editor of the literary Urdu magazine Seep, and he designed several cover pages for it, like many of his cohorts.
Early in his career, Naqsh explored naturalistic painting in his portraits and still lifes. Later, Naqsh combined naturalism and abstraction, creating stylised female nudes—expressionless, short, and stocky—set against desolate but heavily textured backgrounds. This background in his paintings gives depth to the imagery. Naqsh, throughout his artistic career, continued his experimentation with various techniques, styles, and themes. But he is best known for his wide-eyed women, accompanied by pigeons and horses, rendered with thick black lines. The stylised eyes, nose, and forehead of each of his female forms seem imbued with ancient Greek characteristics; however, the female forms' hair, full lips, chin, and body proportions show a sensibility toward Indian aesthetics. Naqsh divides and re-divides the background of his paintings, which could be seen as evocative of his learning of Indian miniature painting or emulating the modernist trends of 1950s Pakistan.
Naqsh has experimented with both watercolours and oil colours. His oil paintings have a thick, impasto-like texture. In contrast, his watercolours replicate the Pardakht technique (meticulously applied short brush strokes, similar to pointillism) of miniature painting. Colour is underplayed in Naqsh's work. He uses muted colours or monotones of grey, blue, and yellow. However, his carefully designed compositions with textured surfaces and skillful draftsmanship are the highlights of his work. Naqsh painted landscapes, still life, human figures, street scenes, nudes, and calligraphy in his unique style. Like the other Pakistani painters of the 1960s (such as Sadequain (1930 –1987), Shakir Ali (1916 –1975), Haneef Ramay (1930 –2006) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928 –1985)), Naqsh made calligraphy a subject of experimentation. His modern calligraphic paintings in watercolour are very different from his earlier works. He studied and practised the art of calligraphy to enhance aesthetic composition and learned the skill to experiment with variations of scripts in his painting. His approach to calligraphy was painterly rather than proving mastery of the skill.
His continuous experimentation shows his remarkable drawing skills, compositional sense, mature use of selective colour palates, and pursuit of art for art's sake. According to Naqsh, "I have no story to tell, no symphony to play, no poem to recite, no plot to carry through, no climax, no anti-climax. The uninitiated audience expects all these things of a painter, and if any painter is supplying all these elements through his paintings, then he is not only deceiving his viewer but also fooling himself. If you must find a plot or a story, music or poem, then you should find them in my treatment of colour, texture, form and composition. Most certainly, not in my motifs".
In 1999, Naqsh, with the help of his friends, established a private museum in Karachi, Jamil Naqsh Museum, which housed 3000 of his paintings. In 2003, Naqsh decided to move to London and remained there until he died in 2019.
His work is in private collections worldwide and is also in the collections of the Lahore Museum (Pakistan), the National Art Gallery (Islamabad, Pakistan), and the Alhamra Arts Council (Lahore, Pakistan).
