One man, many shades

LAHORE: “I am seduced by the goddess ‘Life that inspires so much! And no one could completely get the complexity as the absolute answer! Well that is what life is and that is what we are the ingredients of life with millions of other co-cohabitants."

This is what Ejaz Malik, painter, artist, sculptor, architect, interior designer and the one who initiated furniture design classes in NCA, shared with The News, in a heart-to-heart open talk at Niarang Art Galleries on Tuesday.

A Stalin-like grey moustache and oval-shaped specs give Ejaz Malik a philosopher's look rather than of an artist. He sculptured icons in the world of art and literature. Ghalib, Faiz, Taigore, Pathaney Khan, Mubarik Ali, and many others are a glowing testimony to the fact that the man really loves the finer things in life with music and poetry on the top of the list.

Ejaz introduced the department of interior design to NCA in 1997, and furniture design was part of it. Hailing from a small but well known town called 'Khanpur Katora' near Bahawalpur, he did his BSc from Karachi University and further proceeded to France for making his dreams of becoming an artist come true.

How Ejaz plunged into the realm of art is quite interesting. “My mother was a dentist, she would take us to the clinic where she would make small shapes and toys from the dentures material. That was the first encounter with the basic forms of sculpture. This little but highly significant gesture of a mother's love inculcated the love for art into my little mind.” “We are a confused nation, we confine our thinking. All the great minds had a different way of looking at the world, sadly enough, their perception and understanding of the world took them far away from the ordinary and that also, in many cases, made them 'outcastes and outsiders'.” “I don't see any difference in any form of art because it's all creativity and interconnected by its basic roots while the expression and artistic horizon of every artist is different." Ejaz is a firm believer in the simplicity of life and says, "life is simple , you can't change the sequence of things and to me, as an artist, the most important inspiration comes from life itself since death has no energy but life is the biggest source of energy."

He says it would be wonderful if analogies are made while looking at the sculptures: form, textures, and light, reflected light, fragments working together, diverse phases of the subject's life, symbols and signs. It is to note that real aspects and reality in appearances, when put together, create a sort of abstraction. This abstract phenomenon is what life actually holds.