 Nadia
Saikali (b 1936)
>>In French
Movement
has always interested me very much. Physically, I need to move;
and my paintings must move, too, whether figurative or abstract.
But this movement can be either an inner movement or an actual one.
It can be expressed through many obvious gestures, or through one
subtle manifestation of life, like quiet breathing. A painting breathes
and moves, becomes, expresses its own life. This sense of movement
in life, of cosmic energy, grows out of me, enters the painting,
and becomes a separate, living entity."
The drawing of the lion
was too accomplished for a ten-year-old, thought the teacher. Surely
it must have been traced and copied from a photograph, she decided
- and accordingly graded it with a zero. Nadia Saikali still remembers,
with indignation, that early, unjust evaluation of her creative
efforts. On the other hand, she remembers with satisfaction the
caricatures she drew of her mathematics teacher on the blackboard
and how, when the misconduct was reported, the principal was more
amused than reprimanding when he saw them.
When you ask Nadia Saikali
how long she has been painting, she replies: "All my life."
As soon as she could control a pencil in her hand, her father (a
fine draughtsman himself) began to teach her drawing. He made the
learning of art a game for his children, providing them with colored
chalks and permitting them to use the tiled balcony floor as a drawing
board. In his dental laboratory, they were given the clay and plaster
and wax of his profession to mold into miniature figures; and in
the kitchen there was the left-over pastry dough to play with.
"There was so much
that my parents encouraged us to do, Nadia recalls, "and very
early I became interested in many different forms of expression
- in drawing, painting, ceramics; in music, dance, theater. For
the first eighteen years of my life, I didn't know which to choose,
which to concentrate on. When I finished my Bacc studies and enrolled
in ALBA, I was taking both music and painting there... and meanwhile
also continuing with ballet lessons at another school. I loved dancing
most of all, had a tremendous pleasure in the physical movement
of it, and really wanted to be a ballet dancer. But here, my parents
said no; not a dancer, they said... you can't take that up seriously...
that's not a proper life for a girl of your background..."
Providentially, the ballet
school shut down, and Nadia was left to concentrate on art and music
at the Academy. But another decision had to be made, and it was
her music teacher who finally forced it. To become a good pianist,
he told her, you must practice a minimum of five hours a day...
and to do that, you'll have to give up your other interests. Too
full of physical energy, Nadia couldn't imagine sitting in one spot
for hours at a time; she decided to give up piano. By such process
of elimination, Nadia arrived at painting; and when finished her
art studies at ALBA, she went off to Paris to continue there.
At 20, Nadia fell in
love. After whirlwind romance she married the handsome young Welshman
who dramatically had saved her from drowning soon after they met
in Beirut. The first year of their marriage, he took her to live
in Glasgow. To Nadia it was a dismal time - "The world there
was so cold and grey, I thought I would die... I missed the Mediterranean
sun so much. "They soon returned to Lebanon, but nine years
and two children later they divorced.
In talking about the
compatibility of marriage and art, Nadia's views are perhaps typical
of most women artists who have married: "It's a very difficult
matter, and depends a lot on the kind of husband a woman has, how
much of her time and attention he demands, how traditional his attitudes
are toward marriage and the obligations of a wife. Most of the time
the priority must be given to the marriage, and in our society the
woman is still too bound by tradition and feels guilty if she doesn't
fulfill her duties as a conventional wife and mother. Even though
my husband traveled a lot in his work and I was left with much time
to spend on my painting, I still felt torn between the two obligations
of home and art, especially after the children arrived. It's motherhood,
really, more than marriage that poses the greatest obstacle, especially
when the children are young. A woman must have a tremendous amount
of energy to cope with that and art, too, at the same time. It's
exhausting, physically and emotionally."
Throughout her married
years, however, and even with young children to care for, Nadia
never stopped painting. She always had in the household her own
working space - first only the corner of a room, then later an entire
room to which she could retreat from wifehood and motherhood for
as many hours as she could salvage from the daily demands of family.
Nadia's working habits,
the paint-spattered and disordered atmosphere of her studio, could
well fit into an ideal scenario of "the bohemian artist at
work." She uses no easel, paints either on the floor or against
a wall. Canvasses, large and small, surround her; pots and tubes
of paints, brushes knives, rags clutter the floor. She moves through
this confusion of materials with the sure swift grace of an antelope,
and when she paints, her whole body, the body of a dancer, moves
into action; the gesture which is expresses in paint flows from
a total arm and torso movement, spontaneous and yet controlled.
She says, "I need to move in a rhythmic way, a total way. There
has always been this kind of movement in my work. At first, the
physical gestures were a series of limited statements expressionistically
made, but now the 'dance' I am doing is more total and contained,
more interior and of the spirit than of the body. Maybe it's maturity,
to be able to express life in one long, slow sweep across the canvas,
rather than in a series of small, quick nervous gestures."
The evolution of Nadia's
work was a gradual process of following aesthetic not uncommon in
the development of most contemporary artists. Her entry into kinetic,
however, marked an important departure in her career; it bought
her the distinction of being the first artist (male or female) in
Lebanon (and perhaps in the Arab world) to work quantitatively and
successfully in that technological medium.
The transition from paint
and canvas to the three-dimensional volumes of color, light and
movement occurred organically, out of a need to give concrete substance
to the strong impulses she had always had, as in her love for dancing,
for the expression of volume and movement in space. It all began
with a large collage of nails and other materials on canvas and
her fascination with the incidental play of light and shadow the
protruding materials created. She was at the time deeply into the
study of Zen philosophy, which stimulated her vision to perceive
mystic qualities in the moving life of these projected shadows.
Excited by these new possibilities of expression, she explored one
material after another through constructions on canvas: from nails
to straw, and then to bamboo, all dealing with the movement of form
in space. The volumes of plexiglass and steel quickly followed,
first using a simple revolving light to activate shadows and then
building complex electrical mechanisms to direct rhythmic, moving
symphonies of transparent color and light. In order to achieve these
works, Nadia had to go back to a study of chemistry of kinetics
in 1970; she utilized the services of skilled technicians to help
her realize her ideas.
Today, she can build
the kinetic constructions entirely by herself - form intricate electrical
wiring to the exacting job of cutting, fitting and polishing all
component parts. Her long fingers, lacquered and feminine are now
expert at wielding hammer and steel.
She still looks
like a ballet dancer.
By Helen Khal
Abstract painting on canvas by Saikali
►► Some
of the artist's artwork
Contact: editorial@onefineart.com
|
