Ahmed Parvez was intensely devoted to his art, in fact there was nothing that was not intense about him. He had strong opinions and often disagreed with his peers. Compromise in life did not come easily to him either. His three marriages ended because art dominated his existence. While in London he worked briefly at the Pakistan Embassy to bring home an income but soon his calling as an artist took him back full-time to painting and financial struggles.

His art was exhibited all over Europe shortly after the war in the 1950s and received favorable reviews but success always made him restless. This made the 60s and 70s emotionally tumultuous, he left his family in London and several years later married a Japanese lady whom he met in New York. We are introduced to her through a collaged picture in one of his paintings. She even visited Karachi when he returned, but Ahmed Parvez who could never sustain a long-term relationship, parted ways with her. Much later in life he tied the knot with his cousin but it too, was short lived.

All these emotions of passion, angst, and loneliness fueled his art— the broken scenes of domesticity with jars, mugs, flowers always morphing into something else on the canvas. Splintering, is a word that can best describe the constant explosion at the center. His nucleus, however much he tried, was fated not to be stable. His distinct style developed around the movement of color, geometric fragments and sometimes remains of flora in the landscapes of destruction he so masterfully created. Ali Imam, who knew him well, gave Ahmed Parvez unconditional friendship for he knew how the irrational genius was lonely, and prone to self-harm. Drugs and alcohol were the weapons that he used against himself when he craved for companionship, stability and love which had eluded him most of his life.

I remember Imam Sahib telling me about the two room, cozy home Ahmed Parvez had set up near Indus Gallery and how he had invited him for dinner that he had cooked himself. Somehow his debt to alcohol vendors caught up and he had to leave his home behind. When he received the Pride of Performance award, the money was used to refurbish another flat he rented. Here, he painted a wall mural to celebrate it; again, after a short stint he became homeless. This happened after an unfortunate robbery in Sri Lanka, that left him broke and dispirited.

The current retro of Ahmed Parvez at the VM Art Gallery brings together the work of the master that Wahab Jaffer had meticulously collected and has now been acquired by the ZVMG Rangoonwala Trust that runs the VM Art Gallery. Works mostly seen in books or on the screen, hang on the wall in a chronological order, providing researchers of Pakistani modernism a great opportunity.

While closely studying the oeuvre of Ahmed Parvez that capture such emotional depth, one finds that there is nothing formulaic about the work, even though similarities stretch over decades. But like a changing signature, it holds the ebb and flow of a creative energy, true to the moment when the mind and hand are in harmony. Early works reveal the birth of his vocabulary where light dry strokes connect at wider angles or in loose pattern that hold echoes of domestic spaces. Here, the memory of a mirror, a vase or a mug enter the composition. There are also references to landscapes rendered with layers of swirling translucent strokes. Some 70s paintings are tight and complex like puzzles in which entangled stands of color weave in and out, responding to a creative thought process waiting for resolution. There are works where strokes in warm tones, like waves on the beach, playfully stroke each other. This could be informed by the time he retreated to the fishing village near Karachi. Friends found him there just lying around in a stupor of smoke studying the sea, day and night.

His body of works in oil pastels where pigment is almost ground into the paper till it becomes opaque and glossy, are sometimes meticulously detailed. According to Saadan and Faizan Peerzada, whose apartment he shared near Tariq Road, Ahmed Parvez had frenzied bouts of art making when he would work on several paintings on sheets pasted on the wall in a row. This were followed by quiet periods in which he would travel inward. Another friend who offered unconditional support was Laila Shahzada, the painter who understood his emotional volatility but her husband, Lal Mian was not always so forthcoming. One day at their home while waiting for the couple to return, Ahmed Parvez wrote a remark on a painting he had dedicated to Laila and Laal Mian, that he had changed his mind and the painting was now only for Laila and not for Laal Mian. This indomitable spirit of irreverence is also visible in the notes he left for his dear friend Wahab Jaffer, one such note can be seen on the painting on a thermophore packing sheet, at the retrospective.

In the early 1970s when he visited the Arts Council often, I interviewed him for my art school magazine. He was friendly and easy to talk to but skirted around personal information and was not one to philosophically unpack his thought process, he said it was all intuitive and spontaneous. There was another time in the late 1970s when I invited him to judge a children’s art competition. He came late but stayed for long, engaging with the participants. Just a few months after that I heard he had been rescued by Laila from a hotel near Cantt Station and taken to the hospital, where his body finally gave up.Ahmed Parvez lived a mercurial existence, never comfortable with conformity, like many who are born with the burden of genius. The art he devoted his life to will be his unique raag, created with color and movement that carry the rhythms of his lived experiences.

Title Image: Ahmed Parvez flanked by friends Kamal Ahmed Rizvi (left) and Francis Souza (right).