The artist moved to Bhopal when the late painter J. Swaminathan asked him to join him when he was setting up Bharat Bhavan nearly three decades ago. It was the close collaboration with the older artist “opening many doors” for the young Yusuf. Swaminathan also considered that “there is none better than Yusuf who understands the meaning and magic of the line.” Yusuf employs the abstract medium for uncovering what is not directly accessible. His paintings hint at a distribution of cosmic bodies, their simultaneous aloofness, gravitation and musical movement. In his contemporary abstract paintings, he generally sticks to sparse and geometric forms. The abstractionist generally expresses using a limited color palette over multiple mediums such as oil, ink and acrylic on canvas.