Shamsuddin as born in1986 in Mian Sahib district Shikarpure Sindh.Now lives and worked in Lahore.He received BFA from the National College of Arts Lahore,in fine arts miniature painting.He graduated in the year 2010 with the honors.After completing BFA he started his studio practice.His basic inspiration started with his early teacher from Mian Sahib.He showed a passion and skill for drawing from an early age.

He explored different mediums but currently using gouache on wasli and arches paper.Selected Ecole des Beax Art,Paris France through an Exchange progrome in 2009.He has partecipeted in various group shows. His work had been displayed in group shows locally and internationally.

ARTIST STATEMENT:
Shamsuddin is capable of taking any subject and converting it into his personal idiom, through his tremendous ability of capturing the essence of human body and details of objects around us. Trained as a miniature painter in the Department of Fine Art at National College of Arts, Shamsuddin demonstrates how the concept of skill is not limited or confined. It is neither bound to history, nor chained to a region, and certainly not clamped by a particular tradition.
Shamsuddin exercises artist’s freedom and enjoys the freedom of his subjects as well. Figures with their origin in European classical painting emerge in his new miniature, several without the convention of clothes or presented in prescribed roles/duties. Images of Madonna, muscular men, cherubs, and nude women are painted along with faces and figures from traditional Indian miniature painting. In his work, a viewer encounters the profile of a Mughal Emperor, portrait of
an Indian princess, presence of a maiden from Pahari School of painting – next to unmistakable features of Rembrandt, reminding of his famous Self-Portrait.
In a sense Shamsuddin is focusing on the convention of painting and inquiring the links between different and distant practices of art making. Distant, but not disconnected, as it has been noted that Western masters, Rembrandt for example, were not only aware of the Indian miniature painting, but used these images to make drawings and other forms of art. Likewise European paintings brought to Mughal India had an impact on local painters, so much so that one finds
copies of some Western paintings or their elements infused in the miniature paintings, and some of their recurring themes like Madonna and Child, and saints appearing in miniature paintings as well as in the frescos of Lahore Fort.Those artists from our past were not shy using imagery or technique belonging to other traditions, nor they were reluctant in expanding their pictorial possibilities – and ideas, especially after a contact with other societies through trade, travel and transection of goods. Shamusddin seems to be following his artistic ancestors. He renders playful characters, sometimes interacting with other entities, human or mythological; or with a ghost like body that is understood as one’s silent self. He introduces and interjects a horizontal band in some of these works, thus in the middle of that boundary colors change, mediums move, and treatment is transformed. He puts gold leaf that that area, or opts for strong blues, reds, purples in place of subdued grey and muted greens. stronger hues. More than a pictorial segment, gold-leaf (material/technique) in a few paintings is applied in halos behind sacred personages.