BUY ANY POSTER - REPRINT or HAND PAINTED

Prices:
REPRINTED POSTERS : A3 size (11.75" x 14.5" Approx) - £6, $12 each
(Shipping charges: (1-15 Posters = £5 or $10) (16-30 Posters = £7.50, or US$15)

Hand Painted Oil on canvas poster reproductions of any poster art you see on this website: 2ft x 3ft Oil painted poster: £55 (£18 p&p), $ 110 ($25 p&p)
vintage posters printed on top quality brush cotton t-shirts. Choose any poster or poster art you see on our poster and image galleries and we can have it printed onto a t-shirt!
Sizes: Small, Medium, Large or X-Large - WHITE ONLY
Prices: One side printed T shirt - A4 (8.25" x 11.75") sized: £12.50 or $25.00
– packing and postage is £3.50 or $5 per T shirt.

E-MAIL for order enquiries

LOLLYWOOD POP ART

The 'Pop Art of Lollywood' - Pakistan's film industry - is as indigenous an art form as any yet it is clearly amongst the least known and appreciated of artwork from the Sub-Continent.

'Lollywood' - the Pakistan film industry based in the city of Lahore, reached its hey day in the mid 1970s when over a hundred Urdu and Punjabi films were being released annually. There were some 900 cinemas and 11 studios churning out films. But the advent of video and piracy brought about a virtual collapse of the industry. Today the number of cinemas has dropped to below 400 and the films released to between just 40 and 50 per year and the declining trend shows no sign of halting.

Billboard painting takes place wherever there is something to advertise - but the best of the typical cinema style is created at the nerve centre, the heartbeat of Lollywood, - Royal Park within Laxmi Chowk in Lahore's busy old sector. This hub of narrow, overcrowded, filthy streets is a concentration of film trade offices and hardly an inch of wall space is to be found without some huge Technicolor superhero staring down at you, gun or dagger in hand!

The billboards are composed by the artists from pictures and film stills they are given by the producers of the film. From this material the artists compose w the poster the 'design' of which is then okayed by the producers before the paintwork begins. The actual painting process is begun by whitewashing sheets of tin and piecing them together to form one large billboard. The posters are then drawn directly onto the whitewashed tin and painted upon using oil paints. The completed products are then mounted in front of cinemas. The finished sizes range from 3 ft x 4 ft to upwards of 70 ft x 70 ft.

The artists are made up of people who are barely able to make ends meet in an era of decreasing orders and increasing costs of living. The most intriguing aspect of their work is that none of them has ever received any formal training. The artists have never been even remotely near an art school or a school of design and their talent remains an uninhibited, untutored expression of natural flair. As with so many traditional arts of the sub-continent, the family is the institution for learning and this very specific artistic style has been passed down from generation to generation.

Unfortunately, this remarkable, indigenous expression of art remains wholly unappreciated at home and completely unexposed abroad. The sad fact is that the small workshops of street billboard painters are dwindling in size and younger artists are looking elsewhere to eke out a living - especially as computer graphics take over billboard spaces edging out the traditional hand-painted brilliance with their picture perfect yet lifeless and insipid images.

Original artwork is on sale and we can also have customized paintings created by the expert billboard painters in Lahore.

For further details:
Omar Khan: omar@thehotspotonline.com