“Let whoever may have attained to so much as to have the power of drawing know that he holds a great treasure.” Michelangelo
I’d explain what art means to me if i could. But somehow i find this task to be rather difficult, for art comes in where words fail me, and everything which comes to my mind when i think about my own art comes in the form of an image, not words.
by Syed Mustafa Mohsin
“All you need to paint is a few tools, a little instruction, and a vision in your mind.”
― Bob Ross
work in progress
by Syed Mustafa Mohsin
I have stared at her almost every day of my life.
Observing every last detail, I have absorbed her face, her figure and her smile before losing myself to the depths of landscape behind her. And she has been a kind subject, staring back at me with that half smile, as if leading me on. I have been in a relationship with her ever since my first art class in second grade. But while others admired her for obvious reasons, I have been more intrigued than obsessed. I have been looking for answers.
“What,” I always wanted to ask, “was so special about Lisa Gherardini, more famously known as ‘Mona Lisa?”
Her portrait hung on the wall of our 6th grade art room, as it probably does in every art room in the world. It was the teacher’s favourite point of reference; an image most mentioned and most revered. We were taught to worship Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as one would a god. But in all honesty, the more we were conditioned the more my mind rebelled. I could not appreciate it at face value and in my immaturity I could not comprehend the gravity of its superiority. My youthful rebellion against the obvious earned me scorn from fellow art students, who would get offended and appalled as if I had done something blasphemous by questioning the greatness of The Mona Lisa.
No one could answer my question though. No one could define what they liked about the painting, only that they did. A mindset is what we were trained to develop and my mind would not follow the trail. I started reading, researching and looking for answers. I looked into art books, journals and paintings. The more I searched, the more questions I began to ask.
I started comparing and I started appreciating and I began to understand the difference between speaking from the mind and following the heart. To appreciate the art of The Mona Lisa was a necessary pre-requisite to being an art student. This is why no one ever challenged it. To speak up against it would be equivalent of standing up against all art critics and lovers through time. No one wanted to incur that kind of wrath. I did, not because I disliked the portrait of Mona Lisa – on the contrary I had begun to appreciate its greatness – but because I wanted answers. I wanted to know exactly why I liked it.
She taught me to ask questions; in that respect Mona Lisa was one of the best things to happen to me. She gave me the thirst for knowledge and she pushed me into unknown terrain in the quest for answers. These terrains opened up new and unknown worlds to me. I started to explore art, finding impressions and imitating them. Eventually I started to paint. Having explored so many diverse ways to paint, I discovered that I had stumbled across an expression of my own. I would have never have tried had I not been intrigued by The Mona Lisa.
Article by: Syed Mustafa Mohsin
Faces of Pakistan 