Khalid Saeed Butt's miniature paintings explore the poetic and romantic sense of young individuals. His work depicts various moods and experiences that young lovers undergoes both go through the same circumstances and behave in a peculiar way while facing the situation.
Inspired by the romance pervading ancient legends and folk stories, he freely fuses traditional and contemporary art through his expressions in his paintings. Khalid very beautifully portrays the classical poetry and romantic literature in his paintings. But this time he works in a different style deviating a little from traditional miniature painting. He broke the rules of miniature by enlarging the size of his paintings thus evolving a style of his own by leaving strictly traditional concepts of miniature to a new phase.
The paintings show a girl waiting for her lover or a man is sitting in a pensive mood, in some paintings both the lovers enjoy happy moments and exchange gratitude while in some they just stare in each others eyes trying to read one another's minds. He uses peacocks and birds symbolically for union of lovers or an urge to find a handsome lover like a beautiful peacock. The pitcher is a symbol for Sohni, Mahiwal folk tale of lovers who die for each other while the flute represents Heer and Ranjha's love story.
Khalid has evolved over the time period his own particular style. He uses very sensibly the space and dimensions to enhance his subject. The landscape of his paintings adds a flavour of local place by painting flora find in our surroundings. The use of colour, shape, subject and composition distinguish him from his contemporaries. The attractive soft colour palette of his works also plays a positive role in his works. These colours support the delicate and sensitive figures and create a soothing ambience thus adding a visual appeal to the painting. The backgrounds of most of the paintings are in soft colours except a few depicting night scenes, and the colour schemes are very harmonious and moderate.
His incredible mastery of line and form can be seen in the images of human figures. All of the females are draped in translucent cloths beautify by flowery designs with a touch of gold - living their longing moments. The human figures have some what elongated limbs.
His landscapes are decorated with trees, lakes, sky, rocks, mountains, birds, stars and of course two lovers engaged in romantic encounter, rendered in incredible depth and feeling. These all compositions captures the fragile moments of love companionship or loneliness like a sweet dream. He portrays the true feelings of two people which they have towards each other.
As a creative artist the expressions of his feelings leave a deep impression on the viewers. His subjects are highly romantic from the beginning of his career. His paintings give a feeling of lightness and tranquillity. Khalid is a Lahore based artist, he has obtained an innovative modern style of miniature painting with traditional themes spreading on variety of subjects with an aroma of romance, poetry and history. His recent works will be exhibited today at Ocean Art Galleries Karachi, which revolves around the subject of romance and love - an emotionally close relationship between two people.
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