The artist Ibrahim Hussein

NST Online » Local News
2009/02/21

IBRAHIM HUSSEIN (1936-2009): The art of gratitude
By : REHMAN RASHID

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Portrait of the artist as a young man: Ibrahim in 1964, aged 28


The artist Ibrahim Hussein passed away on Feb 19, three weeks short of his 73rd birthday. REHMAN RASHID offers acknowledgements


Ibrahim in his Pantai Hills home


At Ibrahim’s Dewan Tunku Chancellor exhibition in December 1969, Tun Razak, flanked on his left by Ghazali Shafie and on his right by Ungku Aziz, is bemused by the artist’s painting, Sick Politician.

Datin Sim and Datuk Ibrahim Hussein at the Andaman Resort in Datai Bay, Langkawi, in 2001.
DATUK Ibrahim Hussein would have wanted to thank a great many people:

His father, Hussein bin Keuchik Asyik, for having had "the spirit of adventure" to sail a small boat from Aceh to Penang a century ago, to marry and settle down in Yan, Kedah, raising six children.

His mother, Aishah binti Awang, for awakening in him very early in life the conviction that Ib too would see the world: "You're going to travel far," she'd told him, on seeing a mole on the sole of his right foot, "on long journeys."

His eldest brother Abdullah, for his stoic hand on the rudder of a feckless young artist.

His elder brother Ismail, whose watercolours Ib thought were good, and so copied.

Ib would thank his family for his happy childhood, jumping into Sungai Limau and chasing after distant lights far away across the padi fields.

And also Mr Pereira, headmaster of St Michael's school in Alor Star, for getting Mrs Pereira to teach Ib English.

And George Douglas Muir, chief education officer of Kedah, who personally funded Ib's secondary education at St Patrick's school in Kulim, largely because he'd been impressed by the little boy's determination to sit outside Muir's office all day waiting for a chance to pass him a recommendation letter from Mr Pereira.

And Dennis Gore, art director of Masters advertising agency in Singapore, who gave Ib his first paying job largely for the same reason -- only in his case Ib was waiting to proffer not a reference but a portfolio of drawings.

And Ah Sing, the driver Ib was able to afford with his earnings from the ad agency, who once drove him to the Straits Commercial Art Store, to whose proprietor Ib was also thankful for giving him a Windsor & Newton diary containing an advertisement for the Byam School for Drawing and Painting in London.

And of course he would like to thank the Byam School for accepting him on a scholarship after he sent them some of his paintings.

But the award did not cover transport and accommodation, so Ib would wish to thank the Australian newspaper reporter who wrote him up in a story headlined "Winner of Art Award has Cash Problem", and Ho Kok Hoe, president of the Singapore Art Society, who read the story, looked at Ib's paintings and gave him a ticket to London.

And Ib would like to thank Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, for giving him some warm clothes after Ib arrived there on a cold September day in 1959 only to have his luggage stolen from Malaysia Hall in Bryanston Square.

And Tunku Abdul Rahman, who heard of a young Kedahan art student on a scholarship in London and got Ghazali Shafie to arrange dinner for the three of them at the Ritz, where Ib was introduced to escargot.

And young Captain Hussein Onn, who would study late at the library in Malaysia Hall, where Ib lived, and have supper with Ib before going home.

And Sir Charles Wheeler, president of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1963, who invited Ib to be the first Asian guest artist with the RAA.

And John Wibley, proprietor of the Wibley Gallery on George Street, who gave Ib his first solo exhibition; and Charles Spencer, art critic of the New York Times, for his kind review of that exhibition.

And Edward Roch, a wealthy aristocrat who would drive his Rolls or Maserati to visit Ib at Malaysia Hall just to admire his work. When Ib lamented not being able to afford canvas for his paintings, Roch took it upon himself to supply Ib with all the canvas he was to use for the next 10 years.

For their personal encounters during his early experiences of the West, Ib would wish to thank Bob Hope, Joan Collins, Roger Moore, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsburg, King Vidor, Ravi Shankar, Leonard Bernstein and Rudolf Nureyev.

What happened to Ib's homeland in 1969 brought him back after that heady decade. Ib would wish to record his thanks to Royal Professor Ungku Aziz, then vice-chancellor of University Malaya, for inviting him to hold an exhibition at Dewan Tunku Chancellor, and then offering him a sinecure as UM's first artist-in-residence.

And Ib was always grateful to then deputy prime minister Tun Abdul Razak Hussein, for letting him display his famous painting May 13 at that show after the police had told him to take it down.

Ib would have wanted everyone to know what a rocking place UM's Fifth College was in the early 1970s ("not like now, a nunnery!"), and to thank all the students who dropped by his studio for coffee and a chat, including Hishamuddin Rais, Anwar Ibrahim, Shahrir Samad and Lam Bee, a student from Kuantan who introduced her 19-year-old sister Sim to Ib.

And Ib would surely shower Shahrir with all the thanks in the world for having "kidnapped" Sim from Kuantan after her parents forbade her from seeing him, speeding her back to KL in his Alfa Romeo fast enough to elude the police roadblocks, just so Sim and Ib could be together on Ib's 38th birthday.

Above all, Ib was grateful to Sim's parents for finally accepting him. (For which he would also like to thank Tan Sri Awang Had Salleh, whose glowing recommendation, delivered at a chance encounter of the two men in a Kuantan motor workshop, helped sway Sim's father's opinion of Ib for the better.)

Ib's thanks, too, to Datuk Jamaluddin Abu Bakar, then our ambassador to Kuwait, for arranging an exhibition for Ib in Kuwait in 1977, where Ib would meet Yakob Sifar of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, who took him to visit a PLO desert base, which experience would inform Ib's 1982 series of paintings on Sabra and Shatila.

Sultan Abdul Halim Mu'adzam Shah and Raja Permaisuri Tuanku Bahiyah of Kedah, too, were both very fond of Ib, and he of them; during Sultan Abdul Halim's reign as Yang di-Pertuan Agong, Ib gave Tuanku Bahiyah art lessons at Istana Negara.

Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah of Selangor became dear to Ib while just a 15-year-old prince in London, and they remained fast friends all Ib's life. Ib would always speak of him with respect, affection and gratitude.

So very many people Ibrahim Hussein would have wanted to thank; it seemed a principal objective of his several meetings with this writer in 2007 for a proposed biography. ("See? You never know when someone you meet, or even don't meet, will have a big influence on your life.")

This writer, on his part, would like to thank Ib, Datin Sim and their daughter Alia for that experience, and for having been granted the honour of seeing as a work-in-progress Ib's last great series of paintings, The China Series: huge, vibrant canvases; as powerful, seductive and telling as anything he'd ever done. At 71, Ib was still painting as though he'd just discovered his art.

"My paintings have parallel lives of personal emotion and social commentary," Ib said. "Artists, creative people, we're not practical, we work from the heart. It comes out of your private world and into the world everyone knows.

"Like praying, like sex, my painting is my love, my life, my whole self. God, goodness, prayer, it's all there, in one solid package. I paint the essence of my life.

"My whole life is a journey. No destination, nothing to achieve. I don't look at the future. The future is now. The problem with us all is we worry so much, we worry about worry. The future is death, why worry about it? If we could live as though we're going to die next week, we can perform well, seeing the goodness in people, being thankful to God every morning for another beautiful day."