Mansur Aye

Mansur Aye is one of Pakistan's most popular artists. Renowned for his 'Moon Face' paintings, Mansur Aye is a well known name amongst Pakistani art circles. Mansur Aye was born in 1941 and passed away in the year 2008. In his lifetime the artist executed several paintings, some of the themes included:  Moon-faced girls, stilll life, portraits of women and musicians at work. The artist was prolific and worked in pencil drawings, brush drawing, chemical drawings, water colour, mixed media, acrylic and oil paints. Mansur Aye the artist was self taught and had his first exhibition in Karachi at Karachi Arts Council in 1962. Since his debut, the artist participated in several group and solo exhibitions in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad - where his paintings sold out.

Book: 'Painter of Pakistan' by S. Amjad Ali

He developed his own distinctive style which consisted of utter simplification of the image and rendering the face and the features with a few bold strokes. He used a very thick brush to make an outline of the face in the form of a circle, two straight lines for the thin long neck. A little dot sufficed for the small mouth and often the eyes were shown downcast coyly and drawn by just a semicircle with a fringe for eyelashes.

The vogue for Cubist abstraction was at its height in Pakistan in the 60s and so Mansur also crossed the face and neck with some diagnol lines and coloured them flat separately. The old Cubist trick of showing the profile of the face in the middle of the frontal picture of the face was also used by Mansur.

Thus, the moon-faced girls with the moon in the background became the hall mark of his work.

Title: Village Belle

Medium: Oil on canvas

Size: 23 by 28 inches 

Size: 1987