truck painting art of Pakistan

The truck art of Pakistan is eye catching, astonishing and very colorful. Truck painting art is indigenous art of Pakistan. The floral pattern, calligraphy, poetic verses, human depicts and catchy sentences written on it, make this truck art worth watching.

In Pakistan, the owners of buses and trucks have been decorating their vehicles with great zeal for many years. These adorned trucks vehicles running on the roads, seems like a moving art. The owners, after purchasing their trucks, bring them to the truck art painters to get them painted and adorned. Each part of the truck is decorated with unique style; this unique style depends upon the taste and regional belonging of the owner and it costs him $3,000 to $5,000.

The experts of truck art in Pakistan, claims that, just by looking at truck’s decorations, they can tell that which region the owner belongs to. The trucks of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtonkhawah, has a lot of wood trimming, trucks of Rawalpindi has plastic decoration on them, trucks of Karachi have reflective tapes, in rural Sindh, trucks are decorated with camel bones.

Dr, Peter Grant, in 1995, saw this unique truck art of Pakistan and got amazed. He did some research on this art and according to him, the roots of this indigenous truck art of Pakistan goes back to the time of British Raj. The craftsmen used to decorate carriages drawn by horses, for the gentry. In 1920, the Kohistan bus company, asked Elahi Bukhsh, the master craftman, to decorate their buses to attract the passengers. Elahi Bukhsh employed a group of artists from Chiniot,a town of Punjab. The ancestors of these artists had worked on many palaces and temples, dated back to Moughal Empire. Later on, truck owners adopted this art for their trucks.

A French doctor, Vincent Loos, painted his foxy with this truck art of Pakistan. He took a trip on his foxy from Islamabad to Paris, with his two friends, Dr.Haroon Khan and Salman Rashid. His foxy was named as “Foxy Shehzadi” means “foxy Princess”.