Omar
Onsi, The Gardener of Epiphanies -PAGE 3-
(Photo showing Onsi admiring his sculpture by Youssef Hoyeck, around 1965) - Article copyrighted 1985, The council of the Foreign Economic relations.
When, in 1928, Onsi went to Paris to continue his training at the Julian Academy , we can be sure that he was duly dazzled by the impressionists in the galleries, yet his palette was already, in the main, complete. He returned to Beirut in 1931 and, in his wonderful old Lebanese house overlooking the sea amid the russet dunes, lived from that time on for painting, for painting only, with his foreign wife assisting him to accomplish his artistic destiny, and surrounded by aloe shrubs, all kinds of flowers and, above all, by masses of those rhododendrons which he loved so much his whole life long and depicted over and over again in his watercolors. His garden contained not only flowers but also a little enclosure of tame gazelles, whose graceful charm à la Matisse his brush could equally evoke. His visitors comprised a handful of faithful friends, some – often European – admirers, and a few young painters who were not however his pupils, for he wished to remain as solitary as possible, even if his obliging courtesy and vigilant attention made of him an assiduous visitor of «vernissages» and exhibitions where, after careful observation of the artist’s work, he would pass a brief comment that was never lacking in sensitivity and generosity. Pure spirit that he was, Omar Onsi had no enemies.
Still Life with Cauliflower, Oil, 37.5 x 45 cm, collection Dr. Hassan Rifai
One great friend he had, however, who was also one of his admirers and with whom, as the years rolled by, he developed a dialogue of the deepest kind. This friend was a painter too, an excellent painter whose peregrinations had led him from his native Normandy to Beirut , where he settled in 1934 and was to end his days some forty years later, having meanwhile become so Lebanese as to dedicate to our country – in that little sea lapped triple-arched house of his at «Ain Mreisseh- the whole of his talent, his spirit of initiative and discovery, his teachings also, ranging from the art of mixing colors to the philosophy of art, from the analysis of forms (his painting swung between the figurative and what you might call not so much the abstract as the «constructive») to the intuition of that poetry without which those forms would remain lifeless. Yes, Georges Cyr - that was his name - was by his example and wide – ranging activity one of the most effective ferments in the emergence of Lebanon’s new sensitivity to the plastic arts. His influence spread far and wide during the period of the French mandate and beyond, when he decided once and for all to adopt the country that had adopted him. A friend of Albert Guillaumin, Othon Friesz and Raoul Dufy, he left behind everything that, had he remained to work in Paris, would have ensured his being exhibited at the leading salons and museums – from which his work is however by no means absent. As an extraordinarily deft aquarellist, he too quickly learned to note and denote the strong and supple accents of our landscape and humanity in all their most meaningful radiance. Like Onsi, he was a poet of light, of our country’s light, and one day it will be a pleasant task to try and determine whether it was he or Onsi who most influenced the other in lightness of touch. But it was doubtless a two-way process: if Cyr remains the «airier» Onsi is the more substantial of the two, the one who more impregnates his paper with color, under girding it as it were with the experience of oils, just as, conversely, he took advantage of his familiarity with watercolor to attenuate as far as possible the materiality of his canvasses and thus to simplify and lighten them. Actually, Georges Cyr, in 1950, devoted a three-or-four page essay to Omar Onsi in the third album of the series «Les peintres du Liban» published by les Editions du Murex under the imprint of the Imprimerie Catholique de Beyrouth. At the conclusion of this study he admits in the following terms his preference for the subject’s watercolors: «what wins one over completely in the work of this painter is his watercolors, doubtless because they are less calculated and more spontaneously betray their author’s sensitivity to the enchantment of those colors adorning trees, houses, men and animals. He gathers up full swatches of color like one plucking flowers, and arranges them into a nosegay of tender souvenirs».
Wid flowers, watercolor, 40 x 60 cm, collection Mrs. Haya Onsi Tabbara
And Cyr had begun his study thus: «Omar Onsi is a poet. That should suffice to rank among the best painters, for without that inner life reflected on the surface on the picture in the harmony of shapes and colors there is no work of art but only painted matter. He is a poet in that every vision of the outer world prompts him to rethink that world and imagine its potential relationship to humanity».
The tattooing, watercolor, 33 x 43 cm, collection Mr Mansour Onsi
From all the above it is easy to deduce what themes were to inspire Omar Onsi in painting after painting. A born colorist, his spontaneous bent was to go after color wherever it was to be found, devoting more in his work to the plenitude «of» color and the plenitude of form achieved “through” color than to the delineation and promise of form achieved through the draughts-man’s simplifying stroke. Drawing «defines»: it extracts a fragment of the world and enhances it by detaching it from all the rest. Color, even when it contrasts - indeed, above all when it contrasts -, pursues the dream of a fundamental unity shrouded in the glancing motley of appearances. What line divides, color knits together again in its substantive nostalgia. And the world around Omar Onsi, the Lebanon of his time, was a kind of Paradise , of Primal Garden , every blissful instant of which he thirsted to enjoy. This is how Georges Cyr (yet again - but how acute a witness!) described the Lebanon of the «thirties in an article from «L’Orient littéraire » of 20 January 1962. «It was in the early days of 1934. I arrived in an old tramp steamer spitting fire from its smokestack... It was then Beirut advanced towards me. I can still see the image that then rose in my mind of a hand extended above the waves to offer me its white houses nestling in the greenery of its garden’s almond-trees. In the background, gracefully stretched out in an attitude of repose, the mountains offered the model of its body veiled in rosy clouds.
Mule in front of an "Irzal", watercolor, 34 x 47 cm, collection Mr. Jihad Abillamah
The pleasure was sensual. To be sure, but one which penetrated to the unconscious, releasing images of universal harmony, free flights of fancy, like the state of mind created by the impact of a striking line of verse».
NEXT - Page4
|
