# 626, Oil on canvas, 42 x 30 inches, Early 1970s

RHYTHMIC BEAUTY

What is an artist? To whom does he address himself? And what sort of speech is to be expected of him? Well, there is all kind of speech in the case of the painter, Yousuf Ali one of tenderness, and musical intensity. Indeed the work is suffused with the spirit of the dance. The artist was, surely, a comprehensive soul, who knew the surrounding humanity by instinct, and cared for it. This, especially when he painted musical themes, or the votive ones, or any others. He does not look down upon the earth beneath his feet. That is, he does not observe the world from on high, but is right down on the ground in complete empathy. This same stance cannot have been pursued in so many works, had not the painter personally lived and breathed gentleness. It is thus come his dancing figures, pictures of spiritual joy. By the very force of the logic of his soul, the artist is innerly benign.

To all appearances Yousuf Ali was rooted in India's cultural heritages, and in its lovely liturgies and ceremonials, those ones in which womankind play so seminal a role. Such upbringing gives meaning to the painter's genre. As artist he observed and painted the subtle, if ephemeral, beauty of the human form, and as such the light of a sacramental vision is seen steeped in his work as if in celebration and praise. His work was not designed to arouse the horrors of life but to sense the beauty in the human as the divine yearnings.

The reflection of beauty, then, would seem to be manifested in the body of his otherwise varied compositions. Therefore he invariably tells us something moving of our true nature. His artistry is a means to an end: to consecrate warmth; to plant through visual music the feeling of love amidst a long suffering world, and in which much of our lives are spent. Such is the landscape of this artist's soul. But this does not in the least imply that Yousuf Ali was sentimental. Oh no, he was cognizant of the latest new fangled art fashions, but yet he stuck within the strait and narrow of the authentic and uplifting human emotions. Thus his paintings have the definite impress of his own personality. The range of his colours is sober, and they express a chasteness, which only few artists achieve. In his works the quality of colour is secure. The strong strokes of the artists brush highlight a good hand. His work, as a designer, surely invigorated his paintings no little. They are structured and not a vague colourism. Formally, his figurations are not abstract; but yet they are harmonious arrangements, which turn back on themselves. This method enables the compositions to exist unassumingly in their individual grids. At moments the artist's personae are no other than states of mind, but at others they may be emphatic, symbols and signs. It may be that the painter wished to recreate the aura of the sacral and of veneration. Is this not how we sense the tenor of communion in his work?

The temperament of this work is therefore relaxed and yet intense, complimentary with the overall musical mood. Its formal qualities are constantly enriched by the psychological or spiritual elements. Since both the designing as the emotional elements are well fused in it, it gains ample meaning. So, in one sense, the painter's art is essentially an expression of faith, strongly tinged with the higher life values. Yousuf is not pandering to the crowd and so come his stylistic hesitancies as betoken good breeding and much inner culture.

It is to the good that this early dying painter had the skill and sureness of what he really liked to paint, as though he had the tact not to shout out in loud garish colours. His brushwork is sure but never brash. There are also those qualities, as that of the purity of the line. He depends keenly on rhythm as apart from structure. Yousuf Ali was a modest-by-temperament painter, but still we do know that he invariably painted when the level of his spirit was high and that he had no awareness that the world was looking over his shoulder. He painted to please himself, as much as to explore the recesses of his own mind, and in praise of God whence come his calligraphically superb Allah series.

Hailing from Goa, the painter touches us with this other chord with these evidently well versed, in the very many styles of Islamic lettering. Those calligraphic styles, in the end, form a most harmonious relation with the Indian sensibility. Thus the Allah series gains considerably in its aesthetic finesse.

All in all, here is an artist whose work touches us by its sincerity as well as unpretentiousness. In the 1980's and 90's, Yousuf was in the league which included M F Husain and other masters. Sad that he died so early. Surely, he will live very long through his paintings.

Padma Shri Keshav Malik
(Padma Shri Keshav Malik is an Indian poet, critic, arts scholar, and curator. He graduated from the Amar Singh College in Srinagar in 1945. In 1947-48, he was a personal assistant to Jawaharlal Nehru. During the 1950s, Malik studied Renaissance art in Florence, French at the Sorbonne, and attended lectures at Columbia University. From 1960-72, Malik was art critic for The Hindustan Times and from 1978-2000, he was art critic for The Times of India. Keshav Malik was awarded Padma Shri for literature in 1991. Malik has published ten volumes of poetry and has co-founded the Poetry Society of India.)