Artwork: Waqas Khan, My Blue Moon, 2023, Acrylic and ink on canvas
Pakistani artist, Waqas Khan’s work is about love. He recounts a story from his childhood where the village elders would gather and tell stories of Sufi saints, and Khan reflects that what resonated for him was the great quality of these saints being their universal love. Khan says of the experience: “People would come and sit in the communal space and sing about the Sufis. I was the kid holding the cups of tea. They would just talk about the good things for everybody in this world—love, peace and kindness. Sufi for me is behaviour, how you are with others.”
The word that comes to mind when encountering Khan’s work is sublime. Not the overwhelming sense of awe and terror, of an unknown natural force. While his work has a beauty ascribed to the sublime, it relates more to tranquility, a sense of the infinite as if engaging in a meditative experience with the potential to alter one’s perception of the universe, of life.
Khan began his art career in college in Lahore focused on the figurative miniaturist art from the 17th century. He adapted the precision and delicacy to his abstract process of creating minute, hand drawn circles on archival paper that requires dedication and patience of numerous hours of painstaking work, and that evolves into these patterns, both mathematical and uniquely organic in their cosmology. I’ve written two art stories for Khan’s mesmerising works: Tranquil Pool, 2012, and Breath of The Compassionate IV, 2014. Khan was recently featured in a group exhibition in Rome, TIME FUTURE: Memories, Past and Present (Alberto di Castro, Rome, December 1 2023 – January 20, 2024). Here is an exquisite work featuring one of my favourite hues of blue, ultramarine blue (deepening towards Prussian blue in this artwork), titled My Blue Moon, 2023.