In Search of Halal Painting....

In Search of Halal Painting consists of paintings made during a West Coast plein air road trip in the summer of 2025. The paintings document the artist’s search for something important to paint during an era when notions of truth, meaning, and purpose seem lost. Taking up classical principles of law and order and embarking upon the age-old quest for a halal painting practice, the artist voluntarily embraces Islamic principles of art-making as guides to a virtuous artistic practice, a practice which forces us towards creative contemplation of the Divine both within and outside ourselves. The trip is a success—in the final painting of the series, the artist finally finds something to paint: nothing. All the somethings the artist paints, to point towards the void, the presence of which constitutes everything. 

The Quran implores mankind to reflect on Nature in order to contemplate God, and plein air landscape painting became a practice of dhikr—remembrance (of God)—for the artist. Overlaying various texts on top of the landscapes also allowed the artist to inscribe the paintings with personal dilemmas and untamable thoughts which arose during the painting process, philosophic and poetic agonies which the artist used academic artistic techniques and various forms of language to work through.

Traditionally-trained as an Impressionist oil painter, the artist embraces academic techniques to make art great again. To be sure, this “return to tradition” is not a step backwards into petty ethno-nationalisms, but precisely its opposite. To look clearly at any tradition necessitates that one also see their global interrelations. An honest “return” mandates that the artist inscribe various traditions of diverse cultures into a single plane of intensity (i.e.  the canvas surface) where the traditions correlate—and even compete—in a vibrant discord, producing a Peace beyond peace.

Accordingly, the paintings in this series, while gesturing towards a French Impressionist style (and a French modernist writer), are inscribed with text which plays across different registers: Arabic text from the Quran and Islamic prayers, Hindi lyrics from the Bollywood film Veer-Zara composed in the tradition of Sufi mystic romanticism, English stream-of-consciousness narratives, and even a touch of Gujarati, the artist’s mother tongue. The American landscapes, paired with these lyric texts, echo Chinese landscape paintings and Japanese shigajiku (“poem-and-painting scrolls”), albeit in a post-postmodern (signaled by retaining broken frames) style.

Haunted by the “death of painting” in the modern era and the subsequent futility of painting in postmodern times (“What is the point?”), this series of paintings stages a return to form, crying out for a rigorous global painting practice which brings back into art what has been missing for so many years: meaning. Clear—even if complicated—meaning.

But enough chatter! Patient viewing (hopefully, even if only virtually) of the artworks themselves should reveal to the viewer the same clear-yet-complicated insights.