Internal — working group only · Artist profile and commissioning research · Third revision
The Farooqi Commission
A profile of the Karachi draughtsman Tanweer Farooqi, an assessment of fourteen works supplied by the artist, and a set of recommendations for a ten-work commission in pen and ink — what the drawings prove, what they warn against, and which of three proposed themes the evidence actually supports.
An under-authored artist, a strong hand, and two problems worth solving early
Fourteen photographs of Farooqi's work have now been examined. They settle several questions that earlier research could only answer from reputation, and they raise two that matter more than anything reputation could have surfaced.
In brief: the pen work is strong, and easily good enough to build a collection on — one sheet in particular is better than anything previously assumed about him. The graphite work is a different proposition, and roughly a third of what was supplied would damage an international pitch on sight. And the ink he appears to be using may not survive long enough to be worth a museum's attention.
The finding that shapes every recommendation below. He is not one artist working across two media. He is one artist working in two entirely different relationships to his source material, and left to choose, he moves between them. A ten-work commission issued as a brief and a deadline will return some of both. That is a solvable problem, but it has to be solved in the agreement rather than in month eight.
- Training
- Under Eqbal Mehdi, Pakistan's foremost pen draughtsman
- Office
- President, Artists Association of Sindh
- Office
- Deputy Chairman, Artists Association of Pakistan
- Solo shows
- Three, plus national and international group shows
- Curation
- Award-winning show at the inaugural Islamabad Art Festival, 2019
- Recent
- Portraits of Quaid-i-Azam, Arts Council Karachi, Dec 2025 — curator and exhibitor
- Recent
- Tasalsul, Arts Council Karachi, May 2026 — curator, 30 artists
- Represented
- ARTCITI, Karachi
- @tanweerfarooqi
His public identity remains curatorial and administrative — he is the man who mounts other artists' shows, at a national level. That authority is an asset most artists never acquire, and it is also what has kept his own body of work under-documented internationally. There is no monograph, no sustained critical writing on his drawing, no international auction presence. The commission's task is therefore not visibility. It is producing an authored body of work substantial enough that the record catches up with the standing — and, on this evidence, holding him to the better half of his own range while it does.
His stated subject is worth quoting, because it should shape the theme choice rather than be set aside by it. In his own words, the work is drawn from love stories — "happiness, sadness, loneliness, long waiting hours, meeting of lovers, separation and the moon." He writes poetry alongside painting. This is a romantic, literary sensibility rather than a documentary one, and §08 returns to the complication that creates.
Fourteen works, assessed
Everything supplied, grouped by register rather than by date, because the register is the argument this paper makes. The notes are internal assessments. They are franker than anything that should be put to the artist directly, which is the purpose of an internal paper.
The works' titles are held by the artist and are not recorded here; plates are referred to by number throughout, with a short description of the subject. Attributions of medium are read from photographs and require confirmation from the artist. Reference codes are the supplied file names.
Register A — the pen body · the commission register
The strongest of the fourteen, and the single best argument for the commission. Almost everything the themes ask for is already here: a working street, stretched tarpaulins, a cat's cradle of overhead wire, an ornate corner building rising out of the clutter, people in the lane. The tonal range runs from bare paper to near-solid black without the darks going dead, and the awnings are carried entirely by the direction of the hatching rather than by outline. It settles a question no amount of biography could — he can hold a complex architectural space and put human beings inside it. The weakness is precisely where the commission would be most exposed: the figures at the end of the lane are the least resolved passage on the sheet, notation rather than people.
Sustained, patient, architecturally literate — the mouldings, the balustrade and the dome ribs are understood rather than copied, which is the difference between a draughtsman and a tracer. Leaving the sky as bare paper is the right decision and he takes it without hesitation. Two things for the brief: the drawing stops rather than finishes at the lower right, and the tonal key sits in a narrow middle band, so the building never fully separates from its own shadow. Both are addressed by a stated finish standard rather than by more talent.
The most confident mark-making of the fourteen. Contour hatching across the horses' quarters does exactly what §04 describes — the line follows the form rather than the light — and the white of the paper carries every highlight without a single touch of body colour. This is what his hand does when it is not copying a photograph. Note how much he leaves out: legs dissolve, the ground is four scribbled strokes, and the drawing is better for it.
The most useful portrait head here for the commission's purposes: open, economical, and unfinished at the edges by choice rather than by fatigue. The sunglasses are a real solution — the darkest note on the sheet placed exactly where the eyes would be — and the collar is allowed to dissolve into loose strokes instead of being dutifully closed. If he draws ten craftsmen at this level, Theme I works. This is the sheet to show him when agreeing what the commissioned register looks like.
Vigorous, expressive, and the closest thing here to illustration — the Urdu line beneath makes it a page rather than a plate. The head itself is well observed and the hatched ground behind it is doing proper work, throwing the white hair forward. Worth knowing this register exists, and worth deciding early whether captioned Urdu belongs on the commissioned sheets. It is an asset for the book and a complication at an international sale, and it cannot be decided work by work.
The most technically ambitious of the fourteen, and the one that proves the labour is real. A near-solid stippled ground with a head modelled out of it; the tonal control at the hairline and the temple is genuinely fine, and the pince-nez is drawn rather than described. This is the Mehdi register — the inheritance claim in §05 is visible here more than anywhere else. It is also the sheet that most urgently needs a conservation answer: if that ground is dye-based, it is the passage that will fade first and most visibly, and it would take the whole image with it.
The reason to look hard at this one is the room, not the sitter. The window, the box on the desk, the framed picture, the water beyond — he can build a believable interior space in ink, with a light source inside it. That is the technical prerequisite for Ten Nights, and until now nothing in the record evidenced it. The face is the weakest passage: generalised, slightly idealised, and noticeably softer than the objects around it — the same tell that runs through Register B.
A third method again: drawing on a mid-toned ground and working in both directions, into the dark and up into white heightening. Handsome, and genuinely useful to know he can do it — the white shirt is among the best-observed passages here. But it takes the work away from pure pen and ink toward a mixed drawing. For a series that has to read as one object across ten sheets, this should be either excluded outright or adopted wholesale as the format. What it cannot be is occasional.
Register B — the graphite body · the problem
The most conceptually ambitious sheet here and the least successful. Two views of the same seated woman, one inverted, sharing a single shawl — an idea about doubling that the drawing never resolves. The inverted head has slipped out of drawing, and the two bodies compete for the same space rather than locking together. It is included in this survey deliberately: it shows he reaches for ideas, and it shows exactly what happens when nobody is standing behind him.
Highly finished, competently modelled, and visibly worked from a photograph — the pose, the crop and the flat frontal light are photographic rather than observed. The carpet is the best passage in it, which indicates where the interest actually lay. Nothing wrong with it as private work; it simply carries no authorship.
A film still redrawn. Skilful, warmly nostalgic, and squarely in the commercial-portrait register. Perfectly good work to sell in Karachi; corrosive if it turns up in a book pitched at a curator, because it dates the whole enterprise to a sensibility the international market reads as illustration.
Sentimental subject, photographic source, capable execution. Worth one observation that is not dismissive: the horse is markedly better drawn than the child. He is a considerably better animal draughtsman than the rest of this group suggests, and Plate 03 says the same thing. If a theme ever needs animals, that is a real strength.
A wedding photograph rendered in graphite, and rendered well. This is commissioned-portrait work, and it is probably what a good part of his market actually buys — which is worth knowing when discussing money, because it sets his expectations of what a drawing is worth and how long one should take. It should be nowhere near this project's public material.
Register C — paint · out of scope, but noted
Confirms the record: he is a painter as well as a draughtsman. Loose, atmospheric, and noticeably freer than any of the graphite — the dust is done with real economy and the horses move. Out of scope for a pen-and-ink commission, but relevant to one decision: if the group ever wants a single colour capstone for the book or the auction, this is the register it would come from, and it is stronger than Register B.
There are two artists in this body of work, and only one of them should be commissioned
The split is not pen versus pencil, and it is not portrait versus architecture. It is the relationship to the source — and once identified, it is visible in every plate in §02.
The pen work is decided. The polo riders, the flat cap, the clock tower, the bazaar — these leave things out. The paper stays active. The mark itself is doing the describing, and the artist's choice of where to stop is visible. Even where the drawing fails, it fails through a decision.
The graphite work is transcribed. The couples, the child with the horse, the seated girl — these leave nothing out. The sheet fills edge to edge. The mark disappears into the illusion, and the source photograph is doing the composing, the lighting and the expression. The hand is skilled; the authorship is somewhere else.
That is a working diagnosis, not a character judgement, and it has one practical consequence: a commission cannot be a brief and a wait. Left to choose, he moves between the two registers, and on this evidence roughly a third of what arrived would sink an international pitch on sight. Ten works over a year is not the same problem as one good drawing. It is a consistency problem, and consistency is bought with supervision.
What supervision actually has to mean
- A named art director, from work one. Written into the agreement, not implied. It should be an artist or a curator he already respects — the seniority problem is real. He is President of the Artists Association of Sindh and will not take direction from an administrator, however well briefed.
- No photograph as the sole source. Where a sitter or a building has to be photographed for reference, the drawing is also made from at least one sitting or one site visit. This single clause is what separates Register A from Register B.
- A stated finish standard, fixed on work one. How far into the corners the drawing goes, whether a sheet may stop mid-passage, how edges are handled, whether text appears. Plate 02 stops and Plate 04 stops, and one of those is a decision — the standard is what makes the difference legible.
- Right of rejection, with replacements costed in. A defined number of replacement sheets built into the fee and agreed in writing before the first one is drawn. Nobody negotiates this well after seeing a weak drawing.
- Approval at the drawing stage, not at delivery. Stage photographs at roughly one third and two thirds complete, reviewed before he goes further. The film needs those images anyway, so the cost is zero and the leverage is enormous.
None of this is a judgement of his ability. Plates 01, 03, 04 and 06 are the work of someone with a genuinely good hand and, in the case of Plate 06, extraordinary patience. It is a judgement about what ten works made over a year require, and every serious commission in history has had to solve it the same way.
The question that has to be answered before anything is commissioned
On the evidence of these photographs, most of the pen work appears to be ballpoint — brown-black rather than neutral, with the characteristic sheen, the slight ridging where the ball has loaded, and darks that build warm. Plates 02, 03 and 04 read as ballpoint almost unambiguously. This needs confirming with him directly, because if it is ballpoint the project has a problem it cannot fix later.
Standard ballpoint ink is dye-based, and dye fades. Under gallery light that is measurable in years, not decades. A collection built for a museum acquisition, an auction record and a printed book cannot rest on it, and no glazing or framing fully solves it. Standard conservation guidance for a collection of this kind specifies carbon or pigment ink and rules out dye-based media entirely. The supplied work suggests that standard is not currently being met.
The same conversation covers paper. Several of these sheets appear to be on smooth cartridge or board rather than cotton rag. Both questions belong in the artist agreement, and both belong in the first meeting.
His actual register
Four details enlarged from the plates in §02. These are what the commission is physically made of.
Contour hatching — Plate 03
Line following the form rather than the light. This is the mark that makes a body read as volume, and it is his strongest.
Open parallel hatch — Plate 04
Wide-spaced, confident, paper doing half the work. The economical end of his range and the one that photographs and prints best.
Dense network — Plate 01
Layered fine line with almost no repeated angle, building depth without ever going flat black. The most sophisticated passage in the fourteen.
Stipple field — Plate 06
Tone accumulated dot by dot, at a density that costs weeks. The Mehdi inheritance, and the passage most at risk if the ink is dye-based.
Enlarged from the supplied photographs, not from the originals — a true macro at raking light is still worth requesting, and would be a strong asset for the book.
A technique atlas for briefing and writing
Six specimens drawn in the browser, not photographed. They establish a shared vocabulary for briefing the work and writing about it — the terms used in §04 are drawn from these, and the eventual catalogue essay will need them.
Specimens generated procedurally for this brief. They illustrate technique, not any artist's work.
What the medium demands of the commission
- Hours, not weeks. A densely hatched sheet at 50 × 70 cm absorbs 60 to 150 hours. Plate 06 is at the top of that range or beyond it. Ten works is a year or more of full-time drawing — agree the per-work window before the price, and set the release cadence to his real pace rather than to a marketing calendar.
- Materials decide survival. See the flag above. Pigment or carbon ink, 100% cotton rag at 300gsm or heavier, acid-free throughout, museum mounting, UV-filtering glazing. Institutions check, and they check first.
- Ink reproduces better than anything else. High-contrast line survives print, screen and a phone-sized crop intact. Plate 01 would hold up at postcard size and at two metres. The book, the editions and the social releases will all look like the original — lean on this hard.
- Lock consistency at work one. Sheet size, ink, signature placement, mount and frame identical across all ten, or varying on a stated system. The supplied work already contains at least four distinct working methods; left unspecified, the series will contain four as well.
The Eqbal Mehdi line is still the most valuable asset in the room
Eqbal Mehdi (1946–2008) was renowned specifically for pen drawings. Born in Amroha, he came to Karachi, worked as an illustrator for Lail o Nahar and Sab Rang, held a landmark solo show at the Arts Council of Pakistan Karachi in 1969, and received the Pride of Performance. He is one of very few Pakistani artists whose reputation rests on the pen rather than the brush.
That makes Farooqi something specific and rare: a direct inheritor of Pakistan's pen-drawing tradition, still working. Not a self-taught draughtsman, not a painter who also draws — a named line of descent in a medium with almost no other living claimants.
The supplied work strengthens this claim rather than weakening it. Plate 06 is the sheet that carries the claim visually: dense stipple, psychological portraiture, tonal control at the edges of a dark ground. If a single work has to be shown to a curator alongside the lineage sentence, that is the one — with the ink question resolved first.
One caution, unchanged
Lineage claims invite scrutiny. Before this goes into print, secure documentation: photographs of Farooqi with Mehdi, letters, any written acknowledgement, testimony from Mehdi's family or from fellow pupils. If it exists, it belongs in the book. If it does not, phrase it as study rather than formal apprenticeship — and say so from the start, in the group's own material, before someone else says it.
Comparables — lineage, precedent, and the models worth copying
Each entry carries a procedurally drawn specimen of the relevant mark-making, a link to the work itself, and a note naming the specific image worth sourcing for the reference plates. Those images are to be gathered separately and added to this document.
Lineage — the Pakistani draughtsmen
Precedent — the ones who got out
Models — how comparable work is sold and marketed
What turns ten drawings into a collection
The criteria the three themes were built against, now checked against the work in §02. A theme that fails any of these produces ten good drawings and no collection.
- Both strengths in one frame. If portraits and architecture sit in separate works, the result is two half-series. The theme must force them onto the same sheet — and Plate 01 is the only evidence that he can do it.
- It reads abroad without a footnote. A curator in Doha, a collector in London, a stranger scrolling in São Paulo — one sentence each. Specificity is fine; required local knowledge is not.
- Ten is structural. There must be a reason the number is ten — a real set, a sequence, a count that exists in the world. Otherwise the tenth work is padding.
- Every work is independently narratable. One release, one story, one human being, one film segment. This is what makes serialised release and individual auctions work.
- It needs ink. If the theme would be better in oil, the medium becomes a limitation rather than an argument. Plate 14 is a fair warning that he has the option.
- It suits his sensibility — carefully. He is a romantic and a poet: waiting, separation, the moon. But the portfolio shows something uncomfortable — the sheets closest to that stated sensibility are the transcribed graphite ones, and the strongest work is the observed, unsentimental pen. Use the sensibility for the subject and the pen discipline for the treatment. A theme that hands him romance and photographs at the same time will produce Register B ten times.
The three themes, re-tested against the work
Each carries a compositional schematic showing how the sheet is organised, and an assessment of what the work in §02 does and does not prove about the artist's ability to execute it.
The Hands That Built It
Ten living master craftsmen, each drawn on one sheet with the architecture their craft produced — the face and the fabric of the building in a single composition.
- The set of ten
-
- Kashi-kari tile master, Multan
- Naqqash fresco painter, Lahore Fort
- Woodcarver of Swat or Chiniot
- Stone inlay and pietra dura worker
- Jharokha and screen carver
- Lime-plaster and traditional brick mason
- Stained and cut-glass worker
- Calligrapher of architectural inscription
- Truck artist — the living vernacular
- Hand-bookbinder or paper-maker
- Evidence in the portfolio
- Thin — the least evidenced of the three. Plate 04 shows he can draw a working man's head with real character. Plate 01 shows he can draw a workplace. Nothing in the supplied work shows him putting the two on one sheet, and that junction is the entire compositional problem of the theme. There is also a live risk that a commissioned craftsman portrait pulls him toward the photographic register of Register B, because a sitter photographed once in a workshop is exactly the situation that produced Plates 10 and 13.
- Why it fits him
- The only structure that makes portrait and architecture inseparable. Each sheet needs a face rendered with Mehdi-line psychological precision and an ornamental surface rendered with a draughtsman's patience — his full range, demonstrated ten times.
- Why it travels
- Vanishing craft is a story every culture recognises and every institution currently funds. A Gulf foundation, a European craft museum and a Japanese curator all understand it instantly, and it positions him as a documentarian of skill rather than a nostalgist.
- Release and content
- The strongest fit for the plan. Each drop is a named person with a workshop and a dying craft — a natural film segment and a natural press story. Film the craftsman working and the artist drawing him in parallel; the cutting rhythm is built in.
- Risk
- Craft documentation slides easily into worthiness and NGO aesthetics. The defence is the drawing: unsentimental, specific portraits of individuals, never symbols of a tradition. Commission one paid test sheet before committing to ten.
Thresholds
Ten great doorways of Pakistan — city gates, shrine entrances, haveli portals — each drawn with the person who occupies or keeps it. Architecture as the frame, a human being in the aperture.
- The set of ten
- Anchored in the gates of the Walled City of Lahore — Delhi, Bhati, Kashmiri, Lohari and the rest — then extended outward: a shrine portal in Sindh, a Peshawar caravanserai gate, a Karachi colonial doorway, a Hunza mountain threshold. A route, not a list.
- Evidence in the portfolio
- Strong — the best evidenced of the three. Plates 01 and 02 between them supply most of the proof this theme requires: architectural comprehension, a full tonal range in pen, a believable street. The gap is the scale of the figure. In both sheets the people are small and unresolved, and Thresholds requires a person standing in the aperture at a size where the face has to carry. Pair the theme with the discipline of Plate 04 and it is the lowest-execution-risk option on the table.
- Why it fits him
- The most graphically powerful subject available to pen and ink. Deep-set arches, carved jambs, and dark interiors behind bright thresholds are pure hatching problems. Ten sheets sharing one format read as a single object.
- Why it travels
- The threshold is a universal metaphor with no translation cost — passage, migration, welcome, exclusion — and it sits close to his own theme of waiting and separation. It also opens direct partnership with the Walled City of Lahore Authority and conservation bodies, which brings credibility money cannot buy.
- Release and content
- Geographic serialisation: a map that fills in gate by gate. The strongest visual identity of the three for social release, and the easiest to sell as a complete set to one institutional buyer.
- Risk
- Closest to territory Ajaz Anwar has held for forty years, and the most exposed to the heritage-nostalgia ceiling. The figure in every doorway is what keeps it from becoming a postcard set — make that non-negotiable, and hold the figure to the scale the schematic shows.
Ten Nights
Pakistan after dark. Ten nocturnes of the working night — the tandoor at 3am, the truck stop, the night pharmacy, the fishing harbour, the wedding hall at closing — each with the people who inhabit that hour.
- The set of ten
- Ten hours across one night, sequenced dusk to first light, so the spine is temporal rather than geographic. The moon appears in all ten and is the series' signature — his own recurring motif, made structural.
- Evidence in the portfolio
- Partial, but better than expected. Plate 07 is the surprise: a built interior in ink with a light source inside it, which is more than half of what this theme technically requires and was entirely unevidenced before. Plate 06 supplies the other half — he can carry a near-black field across a whole sheet without it going flat. What is still missing is a night exterior and artificial light falling on a face. One test sheet would settle it, and it is the cheapest test of the three to commission.
- Why it fits him
- Ink's native strength is black, and this is the one subject where the medium's limitation becomes its argument: pools of lamplight cut out of dense cross-hatching, faces lit from below, architecture dissolving. It is also the theme closest to his stated subject — loneliness, waiting, separation, the moon — transposed from romance into the life of a city.
- Why it travels
- Contemporary rather than antiquarian, which is what gets an artist read as a contemporary artist instead of a heritage illustrator. It quietly reframes Pakistan for an international audience: ordinary, working, alive, unexoticised. The most likely of the three to be picked up by the international press on its own merits.
- Release and content
- A built-in countdown — ten nights, released on consecutive nights or over ten months at the hour each work depicts. The film is atmospheric rather than explanatory and is the most likely to stand alone as a short.
- Risk
- Hardest sell to a conservative local collector base, and most dependent on his handling of figures in complex light — the exact passage that is weakest in Plates 01 and 07. Commission one as a test before committing to ten.
The running order should change, and the work is why
Earlier research placed The Hands That Built It first, on the grounds that it is the most fundable and the most press-friendly. Both remain true. It is also, on the evidence of §02, the theme the artist is least demonstrably able to execute — and opening a multi-year programme on its highest execution risk is the wrong way round.
Doing all three at once remains a mistake: thirty works is four to five years of drawing, and a scattered launch teaches the market nothing about who he is. Run sequentially and each volume does a different job.
If the group prefers a single shorter programme: take Volume I alone and commission one work from each of the other two as standalone pieces. That gives the film a natural three-act structure and tests the riskier work at a cost of two drawings rather than twenty.
Eight things to settle in writing at the start
Six are standard for a commission of this kind. The first two are specific to this artist and come directly out of the work assessed in §02.
Open questions for the group
- The ink, in the artist's own words. He should be asked directly what he draws with and on. Everything in §04 follows from the answer, and nothing else can sensibly be decided before it.
- Who art-directs. Name the person. This is now the second decision, ahead of theme and ahead of budget, because the theme choice partly depends on who is available to hold the line.
- Documentation of the Mehdi connection. Photographs, letters, testimony. Still the collection's strongest claim and still unevidenced.
- Which market. Gulf institutional, UK and US diaspora, or the Western contemporary circuit. They want different things and would reorder the volumes above.
- Budget and timeline. Together they decide whether ten works at 60–150 hours each is realistic, and whether a three-volume programme is fantasy or plan.
- Together or apart. A set that stays together is a museum proposition; ten sold separately is a market-building exercise. Both work — not with the same theme, and not at the same time.
- Images for the comparison plates. The reference notes in §07 name what is wanted for each artist. Reproductions are adequate for an internal paper.
Once the first two are settled, the next paper can be the full commissioning brief: work-by-work specification, release calendar, a target list of galleries, foundations and institutions with named contacts, and a draft artist agreement carrying all eight clauses above.
References
- Tanweer Farooqi — artist biography and statement, ARTCITI Karachi
- Tasalsul concludes at Arts Council — Dawn, May 2026
- Portraits of Quaid-i-Azam opens at Arts Council — Dawn, Dec 2025
- Ahmed Shah praises artists' work for festival — Dawn
- Eqbal Mehdi — biography · Clifton Art Gallery · Honouring Eqbal Mehdi — Dawn
- Drawings — Sadequain Foundation
- Ajaz Anwar — biography · Dawn profile
- Abdur Rahman Chughtai — biography
- Waqas Khan — Sabrina Amrani · Ocula · Artsy · Manchester Art Gallery
- MANZAR — Qatar Museums · designboom
- Minty Sainsbury · Carne Griffiths · Stephen Wiltshire
- Contemporary Art from Pakistan — Thomas Erben Gallery
Plates 01–14 are photographs of works by Tanweer Farooqi, supplied by the artist. Reproduced here for internal assessment only and not licensed for further use.