Call it Colin

Salman Toor
revisits his thrilling teenage discovery of the painter Colin David

Colin David happened to me at sweet 16, though ‘sweet’ is hardly the term I would use to describe the pictures he painted. ‘Beautiful’ is too bold, too weighty a word for the delicate precision of his figurative painter’s brush. Let’s just say that Colin painted with skill and style. And at 16, as a student of fine art at Lahore’s Aitchison Collehe, I considered him better than the Masters of Pakistani art, those medaled men called Gulgee, Khalid Iqbal, Shakir Ali and Sadeqain.

I should say that at 16 I was a rather simple soul. I didn’t know much about the world, and the need to know more could always wait a little longer. Consequently, all those references to history and high culture (cubism, factories, folk tales, purdah) in the paintings of ‘important’ Pakistani painters were lost on me. I wanted basically to be a skilled painter of the female form, and Colin David did that for a living.

His name sounded foreign to my ear, foreign and fantastical, and implied vague ideas of adult freedom. It was also utterly alien to the congested middleclass Muslim values of the household in which I was growing up. And then there were his pictures: terribly clean and fresh, at least compared to the dusty vistas of Khalid Iqbal. Unlike his forebears, Colin seemed not to have doused his brush in a bowl of dust to paint a fuzzy impression of a backyard, or a bougainvillea bush in a smoggy Model Town park. His colors were pure, an end unto themselves, and were unencumbered by the dilutions and depressions of the real world.

So they were perfect for me, because at 16 I thought of painting as a release from real life, a miraculous leap into the realm of pure fantasy.

I remember the first time I met Colin David. I was at the house of a school friend. His mother was a rich woman who knew many artists; I could imagine her flattering and haggling inside their studios while her big Mitsubishi Pajero hummed impatiently outside. On this particular evening she announced that she was going to Colin David’s house to look at his latest work. The idea of actually meeting the man whose pictures I would emulate in my notebooks, and of seeing his “latest work” (the idea of the professional artist was never tolerated in my own house), was itself like a Colin David painting: it was too good to be true! And so with bated breath we drove to his DHA house, where he lived with his wife Rukhsana and daughter Karen.

Colin wasn’t white. That was the first thing about him. (To my globalized, dish antenna’d ear all ‘Christian’ names evoked the superior, simple-casual whiteness of the West.) He was a short, dark man, with streaks of silver in his hair and a pencil mustache like Jaffar’s from Walt Disney’s ‘Aladdin’. He gave abrupt smiles. My friend’s mother (let’s call her Auntie) took a swift round of the spacious basement, which served as Colin’s studio, with the ease of one taking a stroll in her own yard. She paused longer in front of some pictures than others. Colin didn’t interrupt her; he leaned on an old wooden table by the easel and playfully smoothened the tips of his various-sized brushes. On the table were expensive tubes of oil-paint, casually thrown about like a well-planned still life. The tubes were neatly pressed at the folded ends of their metallic skins and gleamed under the spotlights installed along the ceiling. And then I saw on the studio floor, inches away from a wall corner, an empty green wine bottle whose cork was missing.

A few hours later we returned to Auntie’s house, and she settled in a big couch to admire her three new acquisitions from Colin’s studio. They were stacked against a precious old Persian wall-carpet. She undid her bun, sipped on fresh pomegranate juice, munched deliciously on raw cucumber slices and said: ‘It makes sense, you know, [crunch crunch] the lonely figure in his landscapes and in these empty rooms. It speaks volumes [crunch crunch crunch] about the isolation of the Christians in this country…’

That hadn’t occurred to me. But of course it hadn’t; I knew nothing about the Christians of Pakistan. In many ways I was on the other side of the isolation this persecuted minority had been made to feel in a viciously exclusionary society. Then I remembered it: in Colin’s house, on our way out, we had passed a dark crucifixion painting on one of the upstairs walls. Just off-center on the blackened canvas was the body of Christ, almost levitating under an eerie full moon, nailed as it was to an invisible cross.

Later I learned about Colin’s own suffering, in particular about that day in 1989 when some angry Islamist thugs smashed the parked cars outside his house and broke into the opening night of his show. They mauled and tore his pictures in front of him, enacting their own fantasy of smashing idolatrous figurines in their holy land. That was when Colin suffered a stroke that permanently impaired his speech.

And yet he remained primarily a painter of pleasure, his paintings insisting on the pure and simple joys of colour, space and form. At 16, when I was first encountering those joys in every part of my life, and was falling in love with my ability to love, Colin came to embody my yearning for a pleasureful world. His name entered my self-made lexicon. Clothes and hairstyles and attitudes were either ‘Colin’ or they were not. A sunny day was not ‘Colin’ whereas a cloudy day most certainly was. Evenings and certain arrangements of plates and bottles were even more ‘Colin’ than a cloudy day. My room began to accumulate with striped and checkered objects. To chance upon a new Colin in an art catalog or at a rich person’s house caused a thrill that required the lighting of a cigarette (Silk Cut, imported). There were girlfriends who were more or less ‘Colin’ than one another. There were impromptu painting sessions of ‘Colin’; a girlfriend’s desire to remain your muse would cause her to strike ‘Colin’ poses to continue to inspire you. And my artist friends and I would weave elaborately complicated stories around successful paintings that came out of these sessions by giving them titles like ‘Seema’ or ‘Tasmiya with Cats’, because in reality there was little mystery to the characters of our model-friends and to our own utterly predictable lives as part-time painters at an elite colonial-style school in the so-called ‘cultural capitol’ of Pakistan.

Actually, Colin’s paintings aren’t that nice . And by that I mean that they are not sentimental. They don’t seep with the candy-floss sweetness of a Renoir. Nor do they take their cue from the convoluted psychoanalytical productions of Dali. They are quiet, yes, but they glow with the suggestive thrill of the nocturnal. Women, zebras and cats linger artfully in sparse forests; sometimes they stand next to striped picnic mats, at other times beyond luminous green pools. What these lithe, stealthy-looking creatures are up to is ultimately of little value. This is because they exist mainly as patterns in the larger game of Colin’s geometrical compositions. They form diagonals and verticals that direct your eyes from one unlikely corner of the picture to another.

Because she is anonymous, Colin’s model is not a person so much as a type of woman. It is a particular type, to be sure – in a society that equates the fairness of a woman’s skin with her marriageability, she basks stubbornly in her brownness. But never aggressively: she doesn’t make you conscious of her class in the way that one of Iqbal Hussain’s busy bodies from the Shahi Mohalla of Lahore does.

One of my favorite Colin pictures (and the first one with which I became properly obsessed) is titled ‘Punishment’. In it, a woman strikes a relaxed contrapostto pose, wearing a bright, striped, sleeveless blouse and blue bellbottoms. She must be angry with the child she has made to sit in a corner of the room, but we can never be sure because both figures are turned away from us. The floor is a deep purple, and the walls a dull baby blue, the kind we see in long-gone art-deco homes (or in our parents’ photographs from the 1970s). The aesthetic is straight out of a Technicolor Bollywood flick, one in which women have massive coiffures and slim waists and shocked-looking eyes. This could be a still from one of those movies, digitally re-mastered and re-released on DVD. But the fact is that this picture was painted in the 1970s. And now we begin to understand the meaning of Colin David: what seems to us like a retro fantasy is in fact the vision of an artist who was brave enough to eulogize the trends of his time.

Colin David was born in Karachi in 1937. He enrolled at the Punjab University when the Fine Arts department opened its door to male students in 1956. Colin was among the first group of three young men who were taught by Khalid Iqbal, and by Anna Molka Ahmed, whose daughter Xara became his first wife.

After obtaining a Masters degree, Colin went to England to study at UCL, where he was a pupil of Sir William Coldstream, an artist who painted in the “Euston Road” group style. One finds echoes of Coldtream’s style in the vertical strokes and use of thin paint in Colin’s own paintings (see ‘Punishment’).

In 1962 Colin returned to Pakistan and joined the faculty of Fine Arts at Punjab University. By 1964 his differences with the fiery Anna Molka caused him to leave PU and join the National College of Arts instead.

He taught painting at the NCA for more than 20 years.

I was far away from him when he died in 2008. I was enrolled in the MFA program at New York’s Pratt Institute, still painting, still making human bodies, my head now full of images from the West’s own tradition of painting, lit up by the likes of Anthony Van Dyck, Caravaggio and Rubens. When I came back to Lahore last year, I thought I could see Colin’s work from a distance.

In a better society, one in which socio-economic betterment would have brought about greater tolerance for difference, Colin’s work could have evolved in many ways. I believe it would have become more complex: perhaps the compositions would have been even more sensuous, distilled into an essence of the fundamental feelings and forms that fill them. In that event, they would have been celebrated by the youth that inherited them, turning Colin David into the favourite ancestor who indulges and even inspires the rebellions of the young.

But this is not that society. And so, in a growing atmosphere of censorship, in a time when the simple joys of love and life are themselves under threat, Colin David’s work hangs ever more precariously in the drawing rooms where it was first hung, enclosed by fear but oddly untarnished by it, its bright, spacious heart still beating with the promise of a pure, pleasureful past.

Salman Toor lives in Lahore and New York

March 4-10, 2011 - Vol. XXII, No. 03