oday when you write an email, no matter how long, or loaded with heavy files you don’t think in terms of expenditure. You can upload and share an entire book, say of 864 pages containing illustrations, without paying more than the regular/ monthly charges of internet connection. Messages, documents, publications do have value, but not what was attached to them in the era of physical postage. Location of the receiver used to determine the cost of a letter; as did its weight. More pages meant more spending. I recall a painter who used to write one-page letters to his friend in the UK, inscribed in tiny script, so that the content should not exceed the single sheet of the aerogram. (The recipient of these micro texts later incorporated them as pictorial pastiche in her artwork).

So was the matter with books. Compared to letters, sending a book could have cost a lot more money, but somehow the postal services made a concession. You were able to dispatch thick books, reasonably cheap, by writing two words on the package: Printed Matter. That made life easy, because the postal bureaucracy created a distinction between the value of a handwritten letter – unique, personal, irreplaceable; and of a printed paper – supplied in thousands, common and disposable.

On can see a similar attitude in the art world. The difference between a single piece and a work with multiple editions is huge; and not only in terms of marketing and clientele, but also in an artist’s approach. Several artists, producing their signature style in individual paintings, sculptures, mixed media, drawings, usually shift when replicating a similar kind of imagery for a certain number of identical pieces: editions. Of course, these prints are sold at a much lower price than a unique creation, but that difference has other effects as well. Some treat editions as affordable, hence inferior versions of their ‘original’ work; for others bringing out a print is a means to reach a wider public, besides jolting, exploring and extending their own ideas and imagery because the technique, scale and equipment for making a print force an artist to think outside of the box.

The show offered a rare opportunity to view the work of modern masters, like Henry Moore, Alan Davie, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and John Piper, here in Pakistan. The Penwith Society of Arts was founded in 1949 in the UK.

The phenomenon was visible at an exhibition of original prints by 12 British artists, held from September 19 to October 6 at the VM Art Gallery, Karachi. Titled The Penwith Portfolio, the show offered a rare opportunity to view the work of modern masters like Henry Moore, Alan Davie, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and John Piper in Pakistan.

The Penwith Society of Arts was founded in 1949 in St Ives, Cornwall, and the Penwith Portfolio was created under the expert supervision of Stanley Jones at Curwen Press in London. St Ives in Cornwall is not merely a town on the sea. It became a catalyst for artists to come out of their conformity. This is best illustrated in the art of Alfred Wallis, who “worked as seaman, ice cream vendor and scrap merchant before he took up painting as a hobby in his retirement. He lived in St Ives, Cornwall, a fishing community and artists’ colony. There he encountered the painters Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. His work was later shown with theirs in London.”

The exhibition at the VM Art Gallery revealed how some (but not all) artists moved away from their course, to produce work that represents a shift in their aesthetics. For example, the lithograph by Robert Adams (a prominent abstract sculptor), a flat image, invokes a sense of volume through its manoeuvring of lines, gaps and gradations. This is especially clear in a pure abstract scenario Adams fabricated that includes a sense of space through bulging lines and varying tones. The most impressive element of Adams’s work is that you believe in its actuality, knowing that it is a product of his imagination.

The craft or skill or drive to turn one’s imagination into real, solid and three-dimensional is evident in a number of exhibits; even though what emerges out of fantasy is not necessarily the mimesis of physical forms. Some opted for visual transformation or translation. FE McWilliam’s Woman of Belfast is a print of his sculpture about existence and its crisis.

The exhibition in Karachi is significant, not only because of our colonial heritage or hangover but also due to the history of our art world. For years, Ahmed Pervaiz was considered an abstract painter inspired by Alan Davie, but looking at the Bird Through Wall by Davie, one discovers that the two artists were striving to create art from “mythology, symbolism and the subconscious”; though employing separate idioms and means (Pervaiz had to rely on Islamic art of geometry and decoration). Another artist who merged the inner and external worlds is Henry Moore. The sculptor whose “work was deeply influenced by ancient and non-Western art” has been imitated widely, especially in South Asia. From Novera Ahmed to Rabia Zuberi, several artists in Pakistan have transmuted the British sculptor’s monumental pieces in their small, manageable objects, fit to fill a section on the mantelpiece or a side table.

Moore’s print from the recent exhibition is about inquiry into the unknown, unseen, unprepared. His lithograph Silhouette Figures with Border Designs, suggests an assortment of his sculptures in outlines/ shapes. Yet in that restricted format, a viewer is able to envisage the power, presence and poetry of the work produced by, arguably, one of the most quoted artists of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. What appears in the print is a variation of human stylisation, now recognised as Mooresque and followed ad infinitum in regions across borders. Intriguingly, artists who were, so to say, heir to their civilisations, ie, Aztec, Maya, discovered or demonstrated their roots through the drawings and stones of Henry Moore.

A substantial number of items levitated around the bounds of territory or time. Hence prints of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Duncan Grant’s work had a predominately abstract concern, regardless of a national or regional identity. Using the language of shapes, forms, colours, texture, these artists aimed for a universal diction/ understanding. This is also true for a print of Bernard Leach depicting a traditional piece of pottery with Mandarin text scrawled on the surface.

What is made, what is printed and what is projected often leads to paradoxes in the realm of art academia, resulting in uncertainty, unacceptance and unrecognisability. However, this is not the case with the Penwith prints of 12 British artists; their diction is as delighted, domesticated and decipherable as a page from a book.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore