“It is a great disappointment to me that we have not as yet a National Gallery, a place to house a permanent collection. It worries me that our cultural activities may be lost to future generations… I would like to donate my work to a permanent national gallery…it is very important that future art students should be able to study our styles and progress. Let posterity decide who is good and who is not.” (Comments by artist Laila Shahzada)

When Laila Shahzada began to make a name for herself, there were very few women painters of repute in the country. Zubaida Agha and Anna Molka Ahmed were already well-known but in Karachi, women artists came into prominence later. As there is little reference material available on the growth of art in the country, younger artists may not be aware of Laila’s contribution to the art scene.

Educated in England and India, Laila’s early training in art was with the Royal Drawing Society. After settling in Karachi, she began to frequent Nagi’s studio in Saddar where local artists met and discussed their work and the events of the times. It was under Nagi’s guidance that she began to explore the technique of painting in oils. “I was able to get her to forget the drawing, and get into the flow of the movement of painting,” commented Nagi sahib when questioned on this phase of Laila’s career.

The artist made her debut in the sixties with an exhibition of water colours that were shown at a soiree held by Fayzee Rahmin and Attiya Begum in her honour. Fayzee presented Laila with an exquisite figure study of his on the condition that she would continue to work hard.

Laila rose to the challenge and within four years (1964) displayed her renowned “Drift Moods” exhibition at the Arts Council. Inspired by driftwood washed along sea shores, she conjured suggestive human apparitions in swirling rhythms, their contorted, tortuous forms spread across the canvas like molten lava, thick and heavy with emotive content. This series marks an important phase of her development as an artist as she began to articulate forcefully in a highly personalized idiom. It also won her critical acclaim. Senior critic Amjad Ali wrote, “Here is abstract expressionism in a new and convincing style”. This series was exhibited in a group show in London sponsored by the Taurus Art Group in 1975 and at the Chilton Art Gallery, London, the same year when Laila held her first solo exhibition in the UK. “Drift Moods” had set the stage and Laila was on her way.

Unearthing Moenjodaro (Mound of the Dead), Laila brought forth her second major theme. She was the first artist to draw inspiration from this archeological site and it was a very imaginative blend of her own inner rhythms, folklore and history. The anguish and pain of “Drift Moods” was giving way  to a calmer more joyous display. Swirls of colour were materializing into fragments and forms of Moenjodaro. The famous dancing girl, the bull, and even the indecipherable Indus Valley hieroglyphics were freely incorporated into her work. These paintings were exhibited in Karachi in 1971 and the show was sponsored by PTDC.

Laila Shahzada held her first solo in America at the Runyon Winchell Gallery. “Her work took the town by storm,” recalls her close friend and senior art critic Marjorie Hussain. She was the first and only artist from Pakistan to be honoured with the key of the city of New York and the bicentennial gold medallion. Exhibitions followed in Pakistan and Tokyo in the 1980s and Monte Carlo in 1983. She returned to London in 1985 for a solo at the Drian Gallery.

Laila was honoured in Pakistan by the President’s Award, the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz in 1986 and that same year participated in a group show at the Shorouks International Gallery, Regent Street, London. In the 1980s she was selected to participate in an international display at the Westminster Gallery, London and in 1989 her work was shown in an exhibition at the Barbican Gallery.

The artist’s last series exhibited at Chawkandi Gallery in December 1993 and later displayed at the Pasadena Museum, California, was inspired by the awesome splendour of the rugged mountainous regions of the north like Gilgit, Skardu and Hunza. In California, her landscapes were judged by eminent critics to be on par with the work of Georgia O’ Keefe, a famous American artist. Marjorie Hussain feels that these mountainous landscapes were “actually landscapes of an inner vision”. Artist Salima Hashmi remarks, “That is when her work became more emotional and philosophical.” Close friend and painter Ajmal Hussain adds, “that the mountain series was perhaps her most expressive work, passionate, well-defined. It gave expression to her true feelings. She had finally arrived, and that’s also why I felt so sad that her life ended when it did.”

Yes, Laila Shahzada died of burn injuries in July 1994. The accident was doubly tragic. It was the loss of a painter of international repute, at a time when she was actually coming into her own. Her work had reached a new level of maturity. The surreal in her was taking over. Though she always painted for the sake of painting, now more than ever, her innermost thoughts were flowing onto the canvas, as if one with her pulse.

Twice married, having gone though the grind of a single parent and self-support, she had also spent the life of a dutiful wife, a loving mother to her children, and a caring daughter to her mother suffering from Alzheimer’s. Laila it seems had always lived with upheaval in her life. She herself confessed, “I’ve been broken and put myself together again so many times that I forget now”. Attractive, stylish and soft-spoken, she has been variously described as a rare symbol of integrity, generosity and dignity and her persona a rare combination of charisma, reserve and kindness, but it was the passion of painting that actually sustained her psyche. Nagi sahib calls her a mystic, a “bikhri ruh”, a “chiragh” blown about by the wind. Marjorie puts it very well when she points out, “there was always an element of mystery about her, a quality of inherent solitude, which was solaced only by painting”. This was the essence of Laila, the inner torment, the passionate ardour, which spilled out onto the canvas in feverish, surreal formations. After all you have to harbour chaos within to give birth to a shining star.

Where is Laila’s work? In the absence of any archives or a museum or even a permanent gallery we have nothing to bequeath to posterity.