Artwork Deep Dives

Artwork deep dive: Helen Khal 'At the still point of the turning world'

Author
Nadine Nour el Din
Published
31 October 2022

This untitled work painted by Helen Khal (1923-2009) in 1969, features vast layered, faintly textured blocks of green. Details of this moderately sized canvas reveal steady, measured brushstrokes, built up to create hazy fields of colour. Dark green forms the breadth of this composition, fading into a rounded rectangle below, in a lighter, brighter green, glowing like painterly facets of an emerald.

Khal is perhaps most celebrated for her abstract canvases, which she painted from the 1960s onwards. In these works, she presents harmonious combinations of colour, executed in variations of shape configurations – rectangles, squares, circles, or zigzags, placed horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. Like many of her Lebanese contemporaries, she felt free to express her individuality regardless of popular tastes.
[1]
For Khal, the affective process of painting in and of itself was more important than the finished outcome. She describes her use of colour as a tool to create "an oasis for the emotions".
[2]
"I focus in on one solitary image", she explains, "on the emotive power of colour. I don’t even want the brush stroke to show".
[3]

Through abstraction, Helen Khal searched for a tranquil respite. After a difficult divorce which involved her subsequent separation from her children, Khal moved away from her earlier figurative works, turning to expressionism in an attempt to navigate a deep sense of loss.
[4]
"The compositions were generally geometric", she recounts, "which evidently meant I was seeking an oasis of order in my life."
[5]

A skilled colourist, Khal’s compositions are rendered in vibrant hues, emanating with light. In an interview, she cites an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton (1935), which she loved, and felt best described the impetus behind her works.
[6]

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is"
[7]

Creating melodic compositions that demonstrate an intense use of colour, Khal evokes a poignant stillness, at once energetic and peaceful. She explains, "I’m trying to find that still point where all the life and energy are, and I’m trying to find it through colour."
[8]

Throughout her practice, Khal’s works boast an ever-evolving palette. She tends to return to particular hues, reconfiguring their emotive roles in different compositions. Shades of green are especially recurrent, and feature prominently in many of her paintings and works on paper. Green forms her seascapes and mountainscapes, as in The Green Sea (1970) and Mountainscape (undated). In these meditative works, colour offers endless possibilities of ‘replenishment’ and ‘sustenance’ within the relentless experience of everyday life.
[9]

Khal has characterised her works as a search for an intense serenity. She arrived at an understanding of the true meaning of her oeuvre, in her ability "to create a presence that may be entered visually, and through that sense of sight, find respite from the jarring realities of a world in which serenity is hidden".
[10]


[1]
Salwa Mikdadi Nashashibi, Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World, (Washington D.C: International Council for Women in the Arts, 1994), p82.

[2]
‘Helen Khal’, AWARE (2021, accessed 15 September 2022, https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/helen-khal/).

[3]
Nada Awar, ‘An Artist’s search for an intense serenity’, Al-Raida, XIII, 73 (Spring 1996), 16-17.

[4]
‘Helen Khal’, Dalloul Art Foundation (n.d, accessed 20 September 2022, https://dafbeirut.org/en/helen-khal).

[5]
Cesar Nammour, ‘A Rich Life’, in Helen Khal, (Beirut: Fine Arts Consulting and Publishing, 2004), 17.

[6]
Awar, ‘An Artist’s search’, Al-Raida, 16-17.

[7]
T.S Elliot, Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 282-283.

[8]
Awar, ‘An Artist’s search’, Al-Raida, 16-17.

[9]
‘Helen Khal’, AWARE (2021).

[10]
Awar, ‘An Artist’s search’, Al-Raida, 16-17.

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Artwork Deep Dive: Suad Al Attar 'A Balancing Act'

Two tall, veiled, women stand together, hauntingly depicted, as one clutches onto a long candle and the other holds her arm, in a balancing act. To the left, the woman in a striped lavender gown holds a basket in one arm and a child above her shoulder, who appears to be sleeping, resting their arms and head on hers. To her right, the woman in green stares ahead, her eyes eerily vacant as she clutches a long candle between the palms of her hands. Below them, a young wide-eyed girl, with short black hair, in a bright orange dotted gown looks straight ahead.