Lahore Painter Turns Bleak into Beauty

By night, Iqbal Hussain moves shyly among the crowds of customers who flock to his restaurant to dine in the shadow of the magnificent sandstone minarets of Lahore's Badshahi Mosque. By day, Hussain takes his pencils and paintbrushes into the narrow, filthy streets of the Heera Mandi, Lahore's red light district. It is on the edge of this seedy quarter that he grew up, the son and grandson of sex workers.

It is here that he transformed the brothel where he spent his childhood into his home and restaurant, Cooco's Den. And it is the women of Heera Mandi that the 56-year old Hussain has chronicled, in paintings that have made him one of Pakistan's most controversial and esteemed artists. ''It's the life around me," said Hussain. ''It's what I live with." Dozens of his paintings, which have been shown and sold internationally and have fetched up to $10,000…