Facts
At least one website gives following history of bus/truck painting in Pakistan and quotes it to one Peter Grant. The extraordinary tradition of decorating trucks has its roots in the days of the raj when craftsmen made glorious horse drawn carriages for the gentry. In the 1920s the Kohistan Bus Company asked the master craftsman Ustad Elahi Bakhsh to decorate their buses to attract passengers. Bukhsh employed a company of artists from the Punjab town of Chiniot, who’s ancestors had [...]
Facts
Pakistani trucks are also used as means of displaying the owner or the Painter’s Poetic taste. It also serves as a calligraphic board as well as a notice board for public messages. Note the two photos below. In the photo to the left the truck owner is declaring himself as hopelessly romantic (ye dil hai aashiqaana) and in the photo to the right he is requesting his beloved to accompany him to his hometown, which is by the way, Khuzdar [...]
Facts
These truck bodies are then immaculately painted by the street artists who can be found at Truck stands all across the country. e.g. Hawkes Bay/Mauripur Road Road Karachi, Pir Wadhai Rawalpindi, Badami Bagh Lahore, Sariab Road Quetta etc. These hired artists then paint the whole truck in brightly colored patterns. It is said that everty city’s artists have perfected their art in their own signature way. Trucks decorated in Quetta and Peshawar get lots of wood trimming where as those [...]
Facts / Truck Art
The art of decorating trucks, which is highly popular among truck drivers, can be used to learn much about the trends of various regions and the aesthetics of people of different ethnicities. Often, the art on the truck is a direct reflection of an ideology that the truck driver strongly believes in. Drivers belonging to different regions and backgrounds decorate their trucks differently, often suggesting a pattern that depicts the culture, rituals and the ground realities of the areas that [...]
