Arts :

Lütfü Günay: The warmth of nature

by Sibel DORSAN

Based in Ankara for over 50 years, Lütfü Günay’s works express his deep love of the scenes and colours of Anatolia and his native Çanakkale. The veteran artist couples his affection for his subject matter with technical skills developed over years of painstaking training and experimentation. He has exhibited in several foreign countries, and has had a long connection with the United States through JUSMAT and the Turkish American Association.

Lütfü Günay speaks the honest, straightforward words of a sincere and unassuming man. It is his time-worn worker’s hands that do the talking. Though washed and washed again, the weathered skin retains within its crevices the tell-tale gleam of paint of every hue. “We are the hands of an Artist,” they seem to say, “We have been drawing and painting for almost sixty years.”

The canvases in Günay’s workshop tell their own story too. His deep love of nature is obvious in almost all of them. But most fascinating of all are his Çanakkale landscapes: paintings depicting the dark blue waters of the Dardanelles or the greenery of vineyards and olive groves.

Some of these canvases are boldly figurative, others more abstract. All have a warmth which embraces the spectator and draws him or her into the centre of the picture. They are inspired by the love of the artist for the region where he was born almost 82 years ago.  

A Çanakkale childhood

“The landscape I was born into overlooked the Dardanelles from the best vantage point, full of greens and blues. The vineyards, the olive groves and the deep green atmosphere of Kilitbahir offered me an environment where I could live out my childhood and early youth freely - where I could be at one with the earth and discover nature at first hand.”

“When I was still only a little child, I used to make models of the ships passing through the Dardanelles, using mud which I mixed from the soil of our vineyard, a plot of sloping land looking out over the sea. Perhaps without being aware of it, I was inhaling and absorbing the colours of the sea, the sky and the olives. Later when I was old enough to hold a pencil, the things I jotted down on paper were once again the ships, the trees, the sea - in a word, nature.”

From school to work

Sprightly for his years, Günay displays all the peace of mind of those who do a job they love. He began his formal art education in 1944, at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, where he attended the workshop of Zeki Kocamemi. He graduated from the Advanced Painting Department in 1949, with a year’s delay because of a fire which engulfed the Academy.

Although very upset by the burning of the Academy, the artist was only too happy to spend an extra year in that happy atmosphere. Zeki Kocamemi, he recalls, attached great importance to structural solidity and plastic structure in painting, and educated his students accordingly.

After graduation, the artist lived in Çanakkale for a year. Looking around for supplementary employment, he received an invitation from Ankara, and in 1951 started working as a graphic artist with the Joint US Military Mission for Aid to Turkey (JUSMAT). He stayed in this job until his retirement in 1980.

The abstract years

Günay’s staged first exhibition in 1953, in conjunction with Adnan Çoker, who had been one of his closest friends at the Academy, It was called the “Pre-Original Exhibition” which he opened. Günay’s paintings, abstract in terms of line and spot, were brave and assertive for the 1950s. The two artists opened a second exhibition at the Helikon Gallery in 1954. The explanations which the two artists put under their abstract paintings earned them much criticism from the famous artists of the day.

The canvases which Günay included in the second exhibition were predominantly geometric compositions which can be described as abstract and non-figurative, made up of large blocks of colour in which light and dark tones supported each other. The exhibition which he opened by himself in 1955 was also abstract in character.

Günay’s first collages date back to 1957. Following on from his abstract painting experiments, they represented a new synthetic, pro-abstract trend dominated by new discoveries with respect to materials and the free outpouring of colour. These harmonious compositions, based on the coupling of red and black or blue and white, combined colours, spots, lines and collage components within a certain understanding of order.

Surfaces transformed

As collage materials, the artist uses paper towels, sand, ash, shavings, newspapers, wall posters and pieces of tin and plastic – all easy to obtain from the surrounding environment. “I chose whatever materials I fancied, and when I combined these with the sense of background that I had gained over the years by working with patterns, they helped to turn the surface of my canvas into a kind of relief, and my abstract painting started to find its way. Unlike the perfectly smooth surface of the painting on the canvas, collage brings a third dimension to the work, creating a perception of touch. Whenever I start to get bored with the smooth surfaces of figurative paintings of nature, I try to achieve the irregular surface that I desire in abstract collages.”

Landscape abstractions and figurative works started to appear in Günay’s exhibitions during the 1960s. In the 1970s, they came to take on more and more importance. It is supposed that his close friend, the famous painter Eşref Üren, had an influence over these figurative landscapes, based on his impressions of nature.

As a student at the Academy, Günay had had difficulty persuading his father about the wisdom of his choice of career. But when the old man, now living in İstanbul, visited an exhibition of his in the Göztepe district of the city in 1979, he was moved by the welcome that he and his son received, and turned to his son and said, “It’s a good thing that you became a painter”.

Views of Ankara

As of the 1980s, the ridges of Kayaş and the shanty town of Altındağ came to feature in the artist’s work. These works were executed in oil pastel, oil paint or mixed techniques, and the suburbs and shanty towns are reflected on the canvas as perceived from a distance, linked by stains.       

Günay regards the various periods of his career as the stages of a single process. “However abstract or figurative my paintings, nature is always there in the background. Integration with nature… I guess this is the guiding philosophy of my art… Throughout my whole life, I have never stopped loving nature, and the more I get to know about it, the more I love it.”

What is intuitive in nature is more important than the visible reality, Günay adds. Consequently, the secret of a good painting is its reflection of the invisible.

A career to celebrate

The artist also directed Ankara Turkish-American Association painting courses between 1967 and 1993. He won second prize at the 31st State Painting and Sculpture exhibition in 1970, and an honourable mention in the 5th Atatürk Painting competition organised by the state oil company TPAO in 1986. He also won honorary awards as a result of his participation in the Inter 7 and Inter 10 exhibitions. In 1994, he took the International Plastic Arts Association prize of honour, and in 1999 received Mimar Sinan University’s 50 Years in Art Commendation Award.

Lütfü Günay has opened more than 90 personal exhibitions and participated in more than 250 joint exhibitions both in Turkey and in countries such as the USA, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark and India. He has produced more than 1,500 works. Many  of these are exhibited in the State Painting and Sculpture museums of İstanbul and Ankara, and in the galleries of institutions such as İş Bank, Ziraat Bank, the Ministry of Culture, the National Library and the Grand National Assembly (Parliament). Works of his are also to be found in private collections within Turkey and abroad. He continues to paint as well as to give private painting tuition in his workshop.

( DIPLOMAT  -  February 2006  -  Ankara )