Mindscape is a popular opening gambit of several senior artists. Datuk Ibrahim Hussein here, Latiff Mohidin and Dato' Sharifah Fatimah Syed Zubir, to name a few. Ib, as Ibrahim Hussein is more popularly known, had captivated with his ribbons of lines, mostly running parallel and curvilinear for some two decades now, with a horizontal orientation and meeting in the central region, not centrifugally, but still in rhythmic flows. What is distracting is the long sepia-tone tape-like line running down slightly slanted near the right edge, like an obstacle but not affecting the composition, and a broad but truncated ‘X' in grey at the bottom, which looks pivotal. It has a blue veneer throughout. Wassily Kandinsky once intoned: “Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality.” Datuk Ibrahim Hussein is world-class based on three major accolades. 1) He was given the global Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum in 1997; 2) He was the first Malaysian to have taken part in the Venice Biennale under the Smithsonian Institute Workshop programme in 1970; 3) He was chosen together with Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali in a best-of-the-world tripartite exhibition in Kuwait in 1977. Other international awards include the Order of Andres Bello of Venezuela (1993), the Order of Bernardo Higgins (Chile's highest honour to a foreigner, 1996), the Japan Foundation Cultural Award (1988), and the XVIII Prix International D'Art Contemporain de Monte Carlo (1984). On the local front, he was accorded a Retrospective by the National Art Gallery in 1986, awarded the Anugerah Tokoh Melayu Terbilang (2007) and had been conferred the Datuk title three times. He organised the first, and most successful, Langkawi International Festival of Arts in 2000, after setting up his museum and foundation (2000) in Langkawi. With the help of his wife, Datin Sim, he organised the Club Mediterranee Asian Arts Festival in Cherating (Pahang) in 1988 and Bali (Indonesia) in 1987. Ib had his art tutelage at the Byam Shaw School of Drawing and Painting and the Royal Academy in London (1963-1966). He also received a double scholarship of Fulbright and John D. Rockefeller II Fund that saw him in the United States, with two solos in New York to boot.