Shafiq Farooqi

The life of a painter is generally assessed by the number of exhibitions of his works, and perhaps this is the only way which a painter can adopt in order to communicate with his age and also to enter into a dialogue with it. In this sense, Shafiq Farooqi’s career is fairly impressive. His paintings had appeared in a group exhibition as early as 1965, and have since appeared regularly in various exhibitions during the last twenty years both at home and in foreign countries. He has been honored with as well as for his services to the art of painting.
In Shafiq Farooqi’s landscape paintings, there is always a central object, mostly a tree that has attracted the artist’s full attention. He has treated it in the spirit of a portrait, and has generally succeeded in revealing the whole atmosphere of the landscape in reference to the single tree.
There is always a question in his mind while painting he central object in his landscape; what is so peculiar about it? Thus, while doing his landscapes, he is guided by their aesthetic and also by the paintings a thing of vegetative beauty. The soul of natural objects seems to be the theme of his landscape paintings.
In his mid-career Shafique Farooqi had taken to the painting of calligraphy. His calligraphic paintings aimed at painting the letters of the Arabic alphabet, and he avoided illustrating them in the conventional manner. He use the brush and the palette-knife in creating the mood and the harmony felt that the letters have a character of their own, which it is the responsibility of the artist to portray.
His paintings on disabled persons have won him honor and distinction in Turkey, England and Germany, and has been prized most for his compassion for the retarded and handicapped children. It is interesting to note that Shafique Farooqi has evolved his own version of beauty which is not formally accepted by painters in our time. He has, however, gone further away in his symbolic art, and has portrayed the complex modern man as an aggregate of variegated personalities. This symbolic painting gives numerous shades of color interfacing into one compact figure.
As an artist Shafique Farooqi has succeeded in bringing anguish in the soul to his art of painting. Though trained on the conventional lines, he has evolved his own vision of creative consciousness and has completed a work which affirms his originality and commitment for beauty which lies hidden in the visual scenes, and which has been released only by him.
His paintings have given something creative to his age, and in this lies his own fulfillment and satisfaction as an artist.