Ollin

Anwar Jalal Shemza

MeemRoots
MeemRoots

Anwar Jalal Shemza (1928, Simla; 1985, Stafford) was a painter, printmaker, and writer from Pakistan who spent the second half of his life in an English market town. He was born on July 14, 1928, in Simla, in the hills of British India, to a Kashmiri and Punjabi family whose business was carpets and military embroidery. He began philosophy, Persian, and Arabic at the University of the Punjab in Lahore in 1943, moved to the Mayo School of Arts the next year, and took its diploma in commercial art with distinction in 1947. In Lahore he ran a design studio, edited Ehsas, an Urdu fortnightly on art and literature, wrote four Urdu novels, and in 1952 was a founding member of the Lahore Art Circle, the group that brought modern painting to the city.

In 1956 he went to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. There, at a weekly lecture on the history of art, he heard Ernst Gombrich reach the chapter on Islamic art and call it functional, the word of his own book. He wrote later that he went home and destroyed everything he had made that could be called art. He felt he had been left without a name. What he found afterwards, in the Islamic rooms of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, was his own inheritance: the carpet, the tile, the letter. In 1958 he married the English artist Mary Taylor. Their daughter Tasveer was born the next year. After a short return to Pakistan he settled in 1961 in Stafford, Mary's home town, and taught art in its schools for the rest of his life, far from the London galleries.

His pictures from then on were built, as he said, mostly from two simple forms, the square and the circle. He put them together from the things he had grown up among: carpet patterns, Urdu calligraphy, the brick and tile of Mughal Lahore, and later the fields around Stafford. On a painting of 1962 he wrote in Urdu: one circle, one square, one problem, one life is not enough to solve it. Of his method he said that his work was based on the simplification of the three-dimensional, architectural reality of the decorative element of calligraphy. The series followed one another: The Wall (1958), the City Walls (1959 to 1960), Magic Carpet and the Chessmen (from 1961), the Square Compositions (1963), the Meem paintings and prints (1964 to 1968), the Love Letters (1969). Meem is the letter M, the first letter of Muhammad and of Mary. In the Meem pictures he reduced it to a disc and a line and repeated it, in red over blue and green, or as clustered discs on wide green stems like the long flowers of a stained-glass window. From 1977 until his death he painted the Roots: a plant on the upper half of the picture and its roots on the lower half, the roots drawn as script too tangled to read, on pieces of cloth he had dyed himself by dipping them again and again in thinned paint, their edges left frayed, laid in two or three on a board. He meant to show them in Pakistan, and they toured there in 1985. He died in Stafford of a heart attack on January 18, 1985, aged 56.

He belongs in this set because his work is a rule you can hold: two forms, and a letter taken apart into them. The Meem pictures keep the letter as a head and a tail and lay the heads one touching the next, their tails falling in even lines, which is a packing and a grid. The Roots pictures put a drawn plant over real letterforms, which is a composition a program can make from a font's own outlines and a rectangle to cut them with. Both were made by a painter who said that calligraphy gave him more satisfaction than painting, and who signed every picture in Urdu with its year. The estate is kept by his family.

Learn more:

Recreations here

  • Meem: the Meem paintings of 1964 to 1968, the letter reduced to a disc for its head and a line for its tail. The canvas is ruled into lanes. A cluster is a few heads laid one touching the next, below or beside it, and every head drops a tail on the cluster's outer side, the tails in slots one gap apart, the lowest head's innermost and the top head's outermost: each tail leaves its head as a quarter turn around it and falls straight to the bottom edge, and the top head's turn passes over its own shoulder, the hook. clusters is how many the seed deals; with mirrored on, the left half is reflected to the right and a cluster on the axis is built symmetric. look is the oils' thin red lines over blue and green bands, or the stained-glass window's wide green stems with white outlines and heads of several sizes and colors. Over one cycle the letters are written as the pen would write them, right to left, each head drawn round and then its tail hooked and dropped; then the picture holds and fades back. A press deals the next picture. An original Ollin interpretation. There is no code to port.
  swift run Example-Recreations-AnwarJalalShemza-Meem

Every head comes back as a circle, every tail as a line or a rectangle, every hook as its arc, and every band as a rectangle, so the file gives the rule back: the heads of a cluster touch and never overlap, its tails lie exactly one gap apart and reach the bottom edge, every hook is a quarter circle centered on its head, the bands fill whole lanes, and a mirrored picture is its own reflection:

  swift run Example-Recreations-AnwarJalalShemza-Meem --seed 1 --export-svg meem.svg --frame 1224
  • Roots: the Roots of 1977 to 1985, a plant above the ground and its roots below it as writing. A board holds panels pieces of cloth with a fringe of threads along their edges. The top piece is the sky, and on it flowers flowers stand on stems: each blossom is a cup, the lower part of a disc, with three lobes of discs joined onto it, the same blossom again smaller and darker inside, and a bud at its heart. Where the sky is tall the stems send roots wandering down to the cloth's lower edge. Each piece below the sky carries a word in Urdu: word is which, or the seed deals one, from root, earth, sky, water, homeland, seed, branch, flower, home, and the letter meem; script is the hand, the rounded naskh of Geeza Pro, the hanging nastaliq that is Urdu's own, or the angular Kufi. The word is set from the face's own outlines at a size taller than the cloth, so it runs off the edges and is cut where the cloth ends, as the painted letters are. palette is the dye. Over one cycle the cloths are pinned on, the stems grow and the blossoms open, and the words are written right to left; then the picture holds and fades back. A press deals the next picture. An original Ollin interpretation. The words are the sketch's own, and legible; his were not meant to be read.
  swift run Example-Recreations-AnwarJalalShemza-Roots

Every word comes back as its letters' outlines cut to the cloth, carrying the move that placed them, and every blossom as the outline the joined shapes make, so the file gives the rule back: set the same word in the same face at the size the cloth's height gives, and the letters match point for point, every cut lies on the cloth's edge, and every blossom is its own reflection about its stem:

  swift run Example-Recreations-AnwarJalalShemza-Roots --seed 1 --export-svg roots.svg --frame 1240

This is a homage after Anwar Jalal Shemza, made for learning. It isn't a reproduction of a specific work, and it isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the artist or his estate.

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