Jimmy Engineer (born August 1954, Loralai, Balochistan) is a Pakistani artist, social worker, philanthropist and stamp designer.
He is a Zoroastrian. His father and grandfather were engineers, and following Zoroastrian tradition, took the family name "Engineer".
Engineer began drawing at the age of five, using powder and water colours. He completed his schooling from St. Anthony's High School, Lahore, before briefly enrolling at Forman Christian College, Lahore. He subsequently joined the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore, where he studied painting. His principal at the time was Shakir Ali, and Khalid Iqbal taught fine arts. He left NCA without completing his degree and moved to Karachi, where he set up his own studio and began working professionally.
Engineer is a firm believer in the teachings of the Sufis, Data Ganj Bakhsh and Barkat Ali. He has described himself as a disciple of Sufi Barkat Ali of Faisalabad.
He became a professional artist in 1976.
His earliest painting series focused on the Partition of India, which he began in the early 1970s. The series depicts the migration of Muslims in the subcontinent in 1947, portraying the human suffering and sacrifices of that period, and was intended in part to educate younger generations about that history.
Engineer has said that the series originated in recurring dreams of bloodshed and violence, which he was advised by religious scholars to render on canvas. Backlit transparency prints of the series are on permanent display at several institutions, including Bab-e-Azadi (Wagah Border), the Pakistan Movement Workers Complex, the Punjab Assembly, and the Chief Minister's Secretariat, Lahore, among other locations across the country. In 1982, he completed an illustrated treatment of Allama Iqbal's Javednama, undertaken at the invitation of Iqbal's son Javed Iqbal.
His output spans a wide range of themes and styles, including landscapes, still life, cultural subjects, seascapes, calligraphy, miniature, abstract, historical, architectural and portrait work, as well as subjects drawn from Pakistan's ancient heritage, including depictions of Mohenjo-daro, Mehrgarh, Harappa and Gandhara. He has worked in both large and small formats, and his practice encompasses black-and-white drawing alongside painting. Some works juxtapose famous buildings from different countries within a single composition, conveying themes of cultural diversity and peaceful coexistence.
He has produced over 3,000 paintings, over 1,800 abstract paintings, over 2,000 calligraphies, more than 1,500 drawings and over 700,000 prints, held in private collections across more than 60 countries. His original paintings are held in the permanent collection of the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, and two drawings each are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Jordan and the Royal Ontario Museum. In Pakistan, his work is held by numerous multinational companies and private collectors, as well as by non-governmental organisations; he donated over 200 calligraphy paintings to Shaukat Khanum Hospital at its opening. He has held more than 100 exhibitions in Pakistan and abroad.
Art critic Marjorie Husain, in her biography of Engineer titled In Search of My Master, characterised his output as spanning realism and symbolism, and noted stylistic affinities with both European Renaissance painters and eastern miniaturists. Editor S.M. Shahid further observed that Engineer's use of natural light brought him close to the Impressionists, while his subject matter, ordinary people and everyday situations, distinguished him from the Renaissance tradition of depicting nobility.
He designed a number of stamps, including a four-stamp se-tenant issue depicting immigrants from India entering Pakistan, drawn from his Partition paintings series, issued on 14 August 2000. The set has been cited by philatelic scholars as among the more accomplished hand-illustrated pictorial stamp designs produced in Pakistan. One of his designs was also printed in Indonesia.
Engineer has been involved in numerous charitable and civic causes. For fifteen years he undertook a sustained programme of taking children with disabilities to public venues, including hotels and restaurants, with groups ranging in size from 200 to 6,000 children at a time. He has also worked on behalf of prisoners, widows and people in poverty, and was instrumental in establishing the first judicial complex within Central Jail Karachi, intended to reduce delays in prisoners' access to the courts. He has organised more than 260 awareness programmes and campaigns for children with disabilities and orphans.
He participated in more than fifty walks for various causes, including a walk from Karachi to Peshawar in 1994, covering over 4,000 kilometres, and a walk from Pakistan to India in 2001. He also walked with Ruth Pfau for the cause of leprosy awareness. Engineer has donated over 700,000 prints of his work to charitable organisations worldwide, and has stated that he has given away ninety per cent of his earnings to philanthropic causes.
In 2017, he inaugurated the fifth Centre for Street Children established by the Society for the Protection of the Rights of Children (SPARC) in the Waheedabad area of Islamabad.
A biography of Engineer, In Search of My Master: Jimmy Engineer, was written by art critic Marjorie Husain and published by Pervez Iqbal. The book carries an account of his artistic journey and includes a selection from his body of work across calligraphy, painting and drawing. It is divided into thematic sections covering different aspects of his output, including a dedicated section on his partition paintings. The biography launch was accompanied by an exhibition of over 100 prints of his work.