A place in time, or a time in place … vistas of open natural landscape, real and/or unreal or abstracted, mediated or composite. A contemplative journey as well as a contemplated arrival, not necessarily an idealized world but one from fragments of memories and touch-points, coaxing moods of lulling quality. Yes, so beautiful, and sad: a sadness with a smile. A broad horizontal big-banded colour sweep with red-scored borders demarcating the space. Pure luxuration of the pin-drop/tapwater-drip stillness, within a darkened hallowed inner theatre with the sensuous sounds of the colours – subdued, muted, deep and sombre. Aptly dubbed as Mindscapes, of the Innerspace variety, Dato Tajuddin Ismail creates or allows to be created, these universal notions of a space binding Man and Nature, the Real and the Void, the within and the without. Traces of elements harking at the soak-stained luminosity of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), the ‘West Coast’ humanized abstraction of Richard Diebinkorn and and the sensuous melancholy of Mark Rothko (1903-70). Also the colour-coded landscapes at home, say, of Datuk Syed Ahmad Jamal and Yeoh Jin Leng. It is no co-incidence that Dato Tajuddin Ismail had won the Minor Awards in the National Drawing Competition in 1977, the National Graphic Art competition in 1978 and the Salon Malaysia in 1979, apart from the National Design Council in 1994. After being adjudged Best Student during his Mara Institute of Technology Art studies (1969-1973), he followed up his studies in Graphic Design at the Art Centre College of Design in Los Angeles (1974) and post-graduate Interior Architecture at the Pratt Institute in New York (1979-1981), where he was also apprenticed to Massimo Vignelli. In 1987, he was also awarded a Fulbright research fellow, by the American Council of Learned Societies, New York. Dato Tajuddin, who retired as associate professor of Fine Art and Interior Architecture at Universiti ITM is now the associate professor and academic adviser in the Fine Art Department in Sunway University, Petaling Jaya.