Chapter 1- The Journey

Life is unpredictable, full of challenges and surprises. In the early part of this year when the hoop-la around my photo collage that I had completed at the Australia day event had died down, I received a phone call that changed the course of my artistic ventures for the year and perhaps will continue to affect the art I will do into the future.

It all started with an overseas phone call in March this year, the caller had a simple and interesting proposition. “There is an artist coming for 'Parramasala Festival' in Sydney, and we are hoping to get him to Melbourne to paint a car for the SalamFest program using traditional Pakistani truck art design. He will be in Melbourne for 3-4 days and will require some support with the car painting. Will you be able to help?”. I was a bit amazed at this unexpected offer and before I could evaluate the pros and con’s I found myself saying “Yes, sure I should be able to help with this”.

Though I had researched Pakistani Truck art in some detail in the past and had assembled an art exhibition “Mechanical Imprints’ inspired by truck art back in 2014, my practical involvement with Truck Art is limited to inspired compositions on paper using ink and acrylic paints. I looked at this offer as an opportunity to work and learn from a seasoned practitioner and I therefore blocked off 3 days in my calendar for this event. I thought to myself, why not? With plenty of annual leave outstanding, 3-4 days of artistic work didn’t seem that big a price to pay for the experience.

As faith would have it, the gentleman did come to Sydney as planned and ended up painting a Toyota van, but unfortunately his Melbourne escapade of painting the car didn’t materialize and was postponed on one pretext or the other. A few days later, I received another phone call, “As the Pakistani artist arrangement has not worked out, will you be able to paint the car for us?” This time my anxiety kicked in and I tried to repudiate my initial response and acceptance by thinking of all the excuses that I could think of at the time “…but I am not a truck artist, I have never painted a car or as a matter of fact seen one painted, I wouldn’t even know what paint to use”. Credit to the caller, her persistence paid-off and after much rumination I agreed to take up the offer - on the condition that I will not be trying to replicate traditional truck art, I will be given plenty of time and that I will be given complete freedom to choose and execute my designs.

The next few weeks were spent researching materials on ‘How to’ of Pakistani Truck Arts. There is plenty of material in cyberspace on truck art- photos, YouTube videos, interviews and articles, but none (at least that I could find!), about how to develop designs for truck art and more importantly what materials to use on the vehicle surface.

Luckily during my exploits on the net, I came across a Facebook page about “Phool Patti Pakistan’s Truck Art Team”. This group is passionate about truck art and Ali Salman who is the managing director and brains behind the group was more than helpful and was able to brief me on typical truck art design, concepts and materials.

An ‘Art Nouveau’ movement, Pakistani truck art focuses solely on the decorative dimensions. Modern day ‘truck art’ practices are aesthetically bold, and rely heavily on standard motifs and slogans to cover the painted surface. It uses a variety of material and methods ranging from oil paints, stickers, reflective tapes and stencils to achieve this end result. Most practitioners of this art form have not gone beyond the aesthetic component of the style to compose compositions that attempt to narrate a message or pitch a story.

I didn’t wanted to replicate truck art in its traditional form as an exposé of colors and pattern without context. Rather, I wanted the artwork to convey the core messages of SalamFest, of  ‘Peace, Love and Compassion’. In addition, I wanted the finished artwork to go beyond a ‘conversation piece’ to a raconteur that could intrigue and lure the viewer to explore the subject matter further.

The car donated for the project was a mid-sized sedan, a 2004 Hyundi Accent. Though not a gem of a design from a modern prospective, the car had a clean, ‘healthy’ surface, with a minor ‘dimple’ on the left side but nothing major that could not be fixed with some muscle power. I started doodling the designs on the sketch pad but soon realized that to get a true appreciation of the area involved I needed to work on actual scale. I scaled off the sizes from the free vector images available on the net to rolls of paper and soon had a paper equivalent of the car surface.

It was only then; that the sheer scale of what I was trying to achieve truly dawned on me. Compared to a typical size painting, the available surface area on the car is enough for one or two very large size murals or easily 10-20 pieces of artwork!

This was further complicated by the fact that unlike paper the external surface of the car is not uniform. Each car has a unique identity and persona; and the car body stylist and designers spend a huge amount of effort to get the contours and the shapes just right. Working on 1: 1 scale drawing provided me an opportunity to tap into these forms and lines to highlight various aspects of the composition.

CONGRATULATION IT'S........A CAR !

Just as naming a child is an exciting time and an important first step in shaping their identity, naming one’s ride has a nostalgic appeal, especially for oldies like me. In my younger years;  owning a car was considered a step towards self-reliance and freedom. As the intent was to use the SalamMobile as a mascot for the festival, SalamFest team thought it would be nice to give the car a nick-name of sort.

As the car was inspired by truck art, the initial tendency was to pick names from Urdu and other regional languages. We wanted to select a single syllable word which would be easier to palate for the western tongue. I was tempted to name the car Harry (after the first camel which landed in Australia in 1840), but reverted against it when I realize that Harry the camel had a reputation for being ill-tempered. I even contemplated ‘Paulie’ after the animation parrot character which spoke and narrated its journey to its owner but refrained myself from suggesting this name due to possible association of the name with one of the stalwarts of ultra-right wing politics in this country who has the tendency to capture headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Love, peace and compassion are the cornerstones of Salamfest, and the event drew lot of its inspiration from sufistic philosophy and we wanted the car’s name to relate to this message.  After a bit of deliberation, the name ‘Rumi’ was proposed after the great 13th century poet, sufi mystic and scholar Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi. Rumi’s thoughts and practice revolves around humanity, love, compassion, tolerance, and respect for others. This aligned perfectly with the festivals message.

Moreover, his works have been translated to a number of languages and is widely recognised in the west. In short, Rumi’s name ticks all the boxes and therefore it was a no brainer to name the car after him.

Naming the car, gave a sense of direction to the design development process. Just as Rumi tried to create an atmosphere of dialogue and tolerance through his writing and poetry, I wanted the imagery to give a sense of discovery and conversation.

Given the cultural diversity that exists within people who identify as Muslim, I felt it was important to make clear and highlight that; like other ethnic groups, 'Muslims' are not one homogeneous group of people, but are impacted by their unique history and cultural heritage. I sincerely believe recognition of this fact, is important to avoid 'branding' and promote assimilation and harmony within our society.

They are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. The challenge was to capture the diverse nature of the people and cultures within this group in a format that acknowledges their heritage and yet maintains the affiliation with the faith. I started collecting motifs and designs from various Muslim countries which were unique with the region and soon enough, I had an album of images of Muslim countries floral emblems, textile patterns, traditional arabesque and geometric designs to work with.  With so many countries to look into, it was not practical to include motifs and symbol from each and every Muslim country in the world; I therefore decided to group the nations into identifiable regions.

The interaction of Muslims with the local indigenous population in the early 16th century brings in an important dimension to the conversation about harmonious collaboration among the diverse group of people in this country.

The images of small sailing boats of Indonesian Makassan Muslims similar to the one found on Wellington Range in Arnhem Land, northern Australia provided this opportunity. Similarly, the key role that the Afghan cameleers (camel drivers from region that is now covered by Pakistan, India and Afghanistan) played in the late 19th and early 20th in opening up the deserts, providing supplies to remote stations, and helping to lay crucial national infrastructure like the telegraph line and the north to south railway needed a mention.And lastly, I felt that there was a need to tie these historical achievements to the present day roles and contribution of Muslim Australians.

I feel that the ‘popular’ discussions around immigration (whether by boat or plane) in this country, is lopsided and tanned by short sighted political agendas and ignores the benefits of multiculturalism to the host society. Thus I wanted Rumi’s design to initiate this dialogue and highlight the journey as well as contributions of the new citizens to the Australian community.

I believe, all faiths fundamentally focus on goodness and humanity. Somewhere along the line in our quest for the ‘right verses wrong, them verses us’ debate, we tend to abandon the fundamentals of the message. We start focusing on rituals but ignore the underlying principles. I wanted to convey this thought in my artwork and reiterate; that though we may follow different pathways to the truth, they are a lot of underlying similarities that needed to be acknowledge and celebrated.

And last but not the least all these individual component needed to be tied into the universal message of peace, tolerance, acceptance, compassion and love which were the key message of the festival and explicit in the writing and teaching of Rumi.

Finding symbols that identified with Rumi was not difficult as whirling dervishes are universally identified with Rumi. The difficult part was to select a few key quotes which were representative of the overall message and yet brief enough to be manageable within the confines of the available space. I started off with a nearly a hundred quotes and eventually selected four that got included in the car design.

Once I had a reasonable idea on the type of imagery I wanted to use, I started putting these designs to my paper equivalent of the car, to get a feel of the scale and aesthetic implications of the choices that I had made. I had to drop some components and rethink some others but eventually was able to pull together nearly 70% of main designs on paper before I actually started painting the car.

I had elected to use oil based paints for painting the car on the pretext that they will be more resilient to weather and general wear& tear that the car surface would endure during its travels. The ready to apply enamel paints available at the hardware store  were easy to apply and relatively quick drying and cured within a day, whereas artist oil paints had an extensive pallet of colours but was taking too long to dry. I explored quick drying additives and mixing of enamels and oils to achieve the required properties of colour and drying performance.

Earlier in the piece, my truck art friends from Pakistan had provided me with a catalogue of various styles and types of stickers used in their razzle dazzle industry; I selected a handful of designs and imported these across to Australia to be used as fillers and connectors in the overall composition. 

The enormity of the task in hand became apparent once I started the work. I soon realised that I will need some help to complete the project in time. I live in south east suburbia and most of my contacts live on the ‘wrong’ side of town. The SalamFest team made a few artist call outs and they were a few hands raised but unfortunately most of the people were an hour plus travel time away and though committed at heart, it was apparent that the logistics of the exercise will make it impractical for them to contribute on a regular basis for weeks at end. A few of my artistic family friends (Jamil Khateeb, Shanaz Akhtar and Anushe Khan) tried to assist where possible despite the lengthy commute and contributed where they could. An honourable mention especially goes to Jamil who not only spent couple of hours travelling each weekend and participated in the painting works but also took ownership of the design of his panel.

Luckily, my sister in law Shagufta (Sha) who lives nearby and is a budding artist herself; and my wife Lubna came to the rescue. While I pondered on transferring the paper designs to the car surface, working out placements and forms, these ladies started brings the designs to life by coloring them in. Though time constrained, hours spent by them were the hours not spent by me.

Considering that I was only able to paint on weekends, I always anticipated that the project would take a few months to complete. I soon realized that hours literally fly when you are having fun. There were some moderate size sections of the design that took 8-9 hours to complete and other smaller pieces which took days to achieve the end results. Soon 8 hours shifts stretched to 10 and later to a 15-hour sojourn. Weekend work become 9 days continuous  12-13 hours daily stretches during a week off and in the last few weeks I was even working after hours during the normal work week. Holidays, celebrations and festivities were all gobbled up by the project.

As the work on Rumi progressed, my admiration for the Yemeni Sufi mystics who introduced coffee to the world grew, and coffee and sugar loaded crackers became my favorite snacks. Proper food was an project interruption; that could and where possible, had to be avoided.

Me and my contributing artist did not maintain formal time sheets, however towards the end, cumulatively we would have easily spend an impressive 1000 hours plus on this project.

Earlier in the project I had made choices regarding paints and materials based on intuition and limited research. I had not worked with these materials before. As the project came to an end, the apprehension regarding the durability of the artwork kicked in. Once the artwork was finished, I carefully washed the car, each scrub and wipe was examined to see if the paint was holding on to the surface. Luckily, it did. I then applied couple of coats of clear gloss acrylics to the surface to provide additional protection and gloss. Once dried and cured, Rumi got two coats of premium polish with lots of 'elbow-grease', to create a lustrous shine.

While at times the physical support was limited, I had plenty of people supporting my effort. Out of the blue, a start up video company ’C61 Media’ got hold of my efforts and proposed to do a short documentary about my art. The talented duo, Main Shabaz Munir and Abdul Basit Javed spent nearly a whole day recording me to deliver an incredible three-and-a-half-minute short film,“The Mechanics of Love”,capturing the essence of my work.

The whole SalamFest team was behind me in spirits throughout this journey. They cheered my every effort, thumbed-up each Facebook post that I posted and provided messages of support to ensure that I continued to be on a ‘high’ throughout this journey.

The Journey that started around 5th of March came to an end on 7th of October, when I together with some of the contributing artist finally handed over the car to the SalamFest team. We commemorated the unveiling of Rumi with a celebration and cake cutting ceremony to mark the end of the journey and perhaps flagging the start of another. 

From now onwards Rumi will be out and about amongst the people, it will be exhibited in various gatherings and festivals up until the last week of November, where it will be displayed outside the State Library of Victoria for SalamFest 2017. The intent is beyond November the tour will continue in perhaps a less hectic pace.

Only time will tell how the people will react to Rumi and whether this art-venture is successful in initiating a dialogue and understanding amongst the wider audience as intended.

As far as my personal artistic fulfilment is concern, during the past 216 days, I have learnt a lot about the content and the practice. I have met some wonderful people, made new friends and learned to appreciate the efforts of the special group of people who volunteer and go above and beyond their normal calling in life. I am humbled by the accolades received about my art and contented about the tiny contribution that I might have been able to make to bring people closer and appreciative of the difference between them.

So, to the question of hind sight, knowing what I know now, would I do it again?

The answer is a resounding …Yes.