In progress:
Switching media
By
Mohamed Ali El-Guindy
Gazbia Sirry, whose latest exhibition opens at the Zamalek Art Gallery on 15 February, is one of Egypt's best known modern painters, with a career spanning nearly 50 years and many awards, including the State Merit Award. She completed her education at the High Institute of Art Studies for Women and the Fine Arts Academy in the late 1940s, studying under Marcel Gromaire in Paris, in Rome's Slade College and at the University of London in the 1950s. Her paintings have been widely exhibited and collected.
The current exhibit is drawn from paintings produced in 2002 and 2003. It is my 66th. I tend to paint in oil every two years or so, the rest of my work being water colour. I am always sketching in water colour as an exercise, a way of training not only my hand but, perhaps more importantly even, my eye. The sketches are always from real life, it tends to be scenery whether in Egypt or elsewhere. The more recent ones are mostly from Egypt, though: Cairo, Hurghada, the western desert, the markets of Alexandria. I paint in all those grass-roots places where there are many simple Egyptians -- folkloric places, coffee shops and alleyways. That's how my water colours are made, on location. When I start doing oil paintings, however, I put the sketches aside, and I work in isolation in my studio. I never use the sketches as raw material for paintings -- this is simply the way I work: not outside, in nature, but isolated in my studio.
It is from the harvest of my interaction with Egyptian society, and indeed my interaction with society all over the world -- because I travel abroad every year as well as reading magazines about distant locations -- I visualise an accumulation of images, a kind of repository that is almost poetic. These images are in turn reduced -- within my mind -- to visual symbols. They are thus transformed into forms, colours, hues, tones and variations.
I do not tend to sketch before painting. All of the imagery is already in my mind. Naturally, nonetheless, while I do not sketch in preparation for painting, I do meditate all the time. As long as I am awake, and even while I sleep, I believe, I continue to meditate, thinking about my paintings and forming images for them in my mind. Each painting that I do begins in this way. First I imagine the composition, then I begin to add and remove colour -- all this, thus far, taking place within my mind -- until, finally, I develop a kind of thirst that prompts me to externalise it, a thirst for it to manifest outside of me. I tend to refrain from painting until my soul reaches my throat -- until I can no longer endure keeping it all inside me, that is -- and in this state I become very nervous while the composition, the one that has been forming gradually inside, paces around in my mind. And it is at this point that I begin to fix and embellish the image -- until the image is finally ready to manifest itself as a new painting.
I always have canvas ready in my studio, in different sizes. I choose the orientation of the canvas -- horizontal or vertical -- before I start to work on it. The colours are chosen without any conscious control, without any will of which I am aware, as it were. I usually prepare myself for painting by listening to classical music. After a while I stop hearing the music. My concentration on the painting is such that its sound simply drifts past me, before vanishing altogether. Then I start to paint and paint. Then I stand back to evaluate and re-evaluate the work, in order to try to grasp it mentally. Then, having evaluated it, I go on painting. I paint and paint. Then I step back to evaluate once again, and so on. Of course I do not finish a whole painting in a single day. Rather, I keep going through this process, over and over, every day, until the painting is finally finished.
Above all else, I allow myself to be absorbed by a theme for years on end, a single theme: the sea, for example, or flowers, a journey into the inner self or migration into the heart of Egypt -- an inward migration. I live in a theme like this for two, three, four, sometimes five years, producing many compositions based on the same topics but in a multiplicity of images. It is like music. It is like different variations on the same tune. The theme for this exhibit is the sea, and houses. I used to paint houses in the past, but this time it's in a different form. Having worked on so many themes in my career gives me the urge to innovate and to develop my style. It stimulates me, it pushes me in new directions, it makes me renew and develop my work. The content is nothing but a stimulus that helps me develop a style of my own. In all sincerity, style is the most important thing.
Some 50 years ago, I began with folkloric realism, which kept evolving through the years until it became modern. Since I always live at the current moment, I remain connected with the contemporary artistic movement. I am an expressionist with an inclination towards fantasy. My style developed with the times until it became somewhat similar to the avant-garde in Europe and America. Today my work is a form of modern expressionism that's internationally up to date, though of course it still carries my own character and style. You could say that this exhibition is the work of Gazbia 2004.
