|  Helen Khal 1923
An American of Lebanese descent, Helen Khal was born in Pennsylvania, USA, and began painting only at the age of twenty-one. In 1946, she went to Lebanon and lived there for twenty-five years. Soon after her arrival in Beirut, she enrolled at ALBA and remained there until 1948. During those years, she met and married the young Lebanese poet, Yusuf Al Khal. In 1949 she studied at the Arts Students League in New York. In 1963, she established and directed Lebanon's first permanent art gallery, Gallery One.
Encouraged by the Lebanese artist Aref Rayess and others, Helen Khal held her first individual exhibition in 1960 in Galerie Alecco Saab in Beirut. Her other one-women shows took place at Galerie Trois Feuilles d'Or, Beirut(1965); Galerie Manoug, Beirut (1968); at the First National Bank, Allentown, Pennsylvania (1969); in Kaslik, Lebanon (1970); at the Contact Art Gallery, Beirut (1972, 1974 and 1975) and at the Bolivar Gallery in Kingston, Jamaica in 1975. Her work also appeared in the Biennales of Alexandria and Sao Paulo.
From 1966 to 1974, Helen Khal was Art Critic to two Lebanese periodicals, The Daily Star and Monday Morning. She taught at AUB between 1967 and 1976. She also wrote a number of publications in the Middle East and the USA and frequently lectured on art.
Her book The Woman Artist in Lebanon was first published in 1987 and was made possible through a grant in 1975 from the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World.
Helen Khal lived in Washington where she was publications consultant to the Jordan Information Bureau. She continues to write and to paint.
She is currently living in Lebanon.
Article in French:
Helen Khal aime surtout la couleur diaphane, éthérée. Elle représente même son unique préoccupation. Depuis peu elle donne à ses toiles une structure qui permet l'expression de couleurs vives plutôt que d'en faire un prétexte à un divertissement chromatique.
Helen Khal est née en 1923 à Allentown (USA). Elle étudie à l'Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (1946-1950) puis à l'Arts Students’ League de New-York. En 1955 elle se fixe définitivement au Liban où elle se consacre totalement à sa peinture. Au début ses oeuvres traduisent l'attraction de la couleur et de la forme, de même que l'ambiance orientale et occidentale. Cependant elle est séduite par la lumière de la côte méditerranéenne et la couleur devient alors sa préoccupation fondamentale. Ou bien elle la travaille, la vaporise, la filtre pour la rendre lumineuse et éclatante ou bien elle l'étale violemment avec audace pour la transformer en mélodie visuelle qui se répercute en écho.
L'art de Helen Khal est un art semi abstrait, parcouru d'évocations d'horizons, de soleils, de lunes et de paysages. Helen Khal qui au début de sa carrière peignait le figuratif, s'est mise dans les années 60 à depouiller les formes de leur chair, de leur consistance et à les transformer en squelettes de verre, diaphanes, traversés et baignés de lumière. Et peu à peu elle se concentre sur les tons joyeux et calmes qu'elle répartit de façon géométrique, comme les couches géologiques ou les fils de chaîne d'un tapis. Cette structure horizontale aux lignes équilibrées en longueur et en largeur finit par s'élever vers les couches de l'atmosphère dans ses oeuvres récentes. Alors le vaste espace aérien se déploie au-dessus d'étroites bandes colorées évoquant tantôt un horizon marin, tantôt un horizon désertique.
Dans les années 70, peut-être sous l'influence de l'enseignement qu'elle dispense à l'Université Américaine, Helen Khal revient au figuratif. Ses formes sont maintenant compactes afin de s'harmoniser avec la couleur, car la couleur enrichit la forme de même que la forme renforce l'expression de la couleur.
Ceci ne veut pas dire que ses nouvelles toiles sont abstraites. Bien qu'inspirés par la nature, les arcs-en-ciel plantés dans l'espace, les surfaces horizontales sous des rectangles verticaux, les courbes inclinées, tout cela représente comme des visions évocatrices de plaines ou de falaises mystérieuses.
Néanmoins l'élément prédominant dans la peinture de Helen Khal reste l'évocation de l'ardeur brûlante du soleil
Translated to English:
Helen Khal has a special liking for diaphanous, ethereal color. It is indeed her only concern. Recently, however, she has introduced in her canvases a structure that enables bright colors to express something instead of using them as a pretext for a chromatic entertainment.
She was born in 1923 in Allentown, USA. She studied at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts between 1946 and 1950, and afterwards at the Art Students' League in New York. In 1955 she took up residence in Lebanon where she devoted herself entirely to her painting. At the beginning her works denote a double attraction to form and color and an interest in both oriental and western atmosphere. Later on, however, she was captivated by the light of the Mediterranean coast, and color then became her major preoccupation. She either vaporizes it, filters it to make it luminous and sparkling, or she spreads it with force and courage in an attempt to transform it into a reverberating visual melody.
Helen Khal's art is semi-abstract, evocative of horizons, suns, moons, and landscapes. At the beginning of her career she was a figurative painter but began in the sixties to strip the forms of their flesh and their texture, to transform them into glass skeletons, translucent and soaked with light. Gradually she began to concentrate on gay and calm shades which she applied in a geometric pattern, similar to that of the earth's strata or that of the warps in a carpet. This horizontal arrangement with lines balanced in length and breadth rises towards the strata of the atmosphere in her later works. The vast air space stretches above narrow colored areas, connotating now an horizon at sea, now an horizon in the desert.
But in the seventies, and perhaps under the influence of her art teaching at the American University, Helen Khal returned to figurative art. Her forms are now compact to be in harmony with color. Indeed, color reinforces form in as much as form gives more presence to color. This is not to say that her recent paintings are abstract. Although inspired by nature, the rainbows spanning the sky, the horizontal surfaces under vertical rectangles and the sloping curves all represent evocative visions of mysterious plains or cliffs.
But above all, the dominant element in Helen Khal's painting is the fiery intensity of the sun.
Bouquet of flowers 36 x 51cm
►► Some
of the artist's artwork
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