Marbles are a game of chance. It was a favourite children’s pastime before the advent of computers and the Internet. Now you can still play marbles, but digitally. Without the physical touch of the component of glass, clay, plastic/agate and even steel. Self-taught Latif Maulan is drawn to marbles because it presents a challenge to reproduce on paper, with the play of light, reflection, transparent quality and patterns with his own Photo-Realism techniques. This with some eight marbles, he composed on a random spread of newspapers, with different headlines unrelated to the painting’s theme. There are several games connected with marbles, including Ringer, where competing players take turns to knock out other players’ marbles placed inside a circle (usually on the sand) with their own marbles. Latif made his Henry Butcher debut on his marbles painting on April 21, 2015, when his 2011 work sold for a premium of RM14,300, from a low estimate of only RM4,000. Self-taught Latif Maulan’s art career reads like a fairy-tale. Somewhat a drifter having worked as a dishwasher, waiter, advertising designer, shopping-complex display artist, he was given a resident’s artist stint in Kuala Lumpur, and a fulltime artist in 1992. He decided to venture abroad. To the Big Apple where he sold two large works in the Soloat Collector’s Party at Excel Gallery, New York, two weeks in 2000), Australia (2001), a year in East Sussex in Britain as a graphic designer (2002), and six months in Plymouth (2013), where he showed at the Barbican Gallery there. First solo, Parallel Universe, at the Art Case Galleries, Kuala Lumpur, 2006. In 2006, he had already moved into Photo-Realism figuratives from his Nature and still-life themes. A finalist in the 2009 MEAA competition, he won big in the Redbull ehwaubulan showcase in 2016.