Arts:

Kayıhan Keskinok: The spirit of the Republic

by Sibel DORSAN

The plane tree is large, long-lived and resistant to the elements, providing ample shade and greenery year after year. This year’s winner of the “Plane Tree of Art Award”, presented by the Ankara-based ‘Dünya Kitle İletişim Araştırma Vakfı’ (World Mass Communications Research Foundation) is a painter the same age as the Republic itself – an important artist who has constantly renewed himself, and is still going from strength to strength: Kayıhan Keskinok. Keskinok received the award last month, during the 17^th Ankara Film Festival, organised by the Foundation. He was described as a modern educator, who has raised countless students, a producer of hundreds of modern works, an upholder of the principles of Kemalism, a responsible intellectual and a man of principle…

Born in İzmir in 1923, Kayıhan Keskinok has only praise for the efforts of the young Turkish Republic, declared the same year, in providing him with an artistic education that helped put him on a par with the contemporary painters of Europe. He has paid his debt many times over, not only as a teacher himself, or with his paintings on national themes, but with his art ‘per se’ in each of its many transformations.

It began in the second-to-the back row of a second-grade primary school classroom. Though younger and smaller than his peers, he chose this seat so that he could draw without being bothered. Then came the Adana Teacher Training College. Although he had dreamed of going to military school and becoming a pilot, the timeless death of his father had forced him to choose a profession which did not, in those days, require a long period of training. He later fulfilled his wishes, he notes, by taking glider training from the Turkish Aeronautics Institute, winning his wings and parachuting.

At the College, there were many teachers who had studied abroad. Keskinok recalls the encouragement of headteacher Mehmet Naci Ecer, who had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and prepared his thesis on Montaigne, Design and sculpture classes with the artist Hasan Kavruk greatly developed his abilities.

“The Republic,” he says, “that poverty stricken Republic, left no one out in the rain. They gathered orphaned children under one roof and educated them. First they taught us to work, then to dance, to swim, to exercise, to play an instrument, to eat with knives and forks from china plates at tables covered with linen. They taught the love of mankind and country, the joy of living and much else besides.” There were four or five pianos in the music classroom. He played the mandolin well and was so good at every branch of sport that he wanted to become a physical education teacher.

To Europe and back

It was none other than his gym teacher who explained to him that he was gifted and should pursue painting. Moved by this advice, he decided to attend the Gazi Education Institute. A sixty-page study of the Mount Ararat, which he undertook while teaching for a year in Kars to fulfil the acceptance requirements of the Institute, later became a work of reference for the students of the Geography Faculty.

Keskinok studied at the Institute in Ankara from 1942-45. After graduating, he taught painting and art history at several lycees. At the same time, he concentrated on improving his French. This paid off in the 1960s, when he passed an exam organised by the Swiss Government with full marks, and joined the Lausanne Ecole des Beaux-Arts as an assistant. Here he learned of “plastic grammar” and much else. But he insists that his Gazi Institute background was at the root of his success. What influenced him most while in Switzerland, he says, was the Bauhaus precept that “Art should arise from within life”.

On his return from Switzerland, he taught for six years at the Gazi Institute. He later worked as decorator and director for the Directorate of Artistic Services at the State Broadcasting Corporation TRT. Since his retirement in 1980 he has been directing the workshop which bears his name and working as an independent artist.

Ready for the crowds

The artist’s works of the 1945-1950 period display transitions of colour reminiscent of Cezanne. Figures entered his compositions in 1946. At that time, he was teaching at the same school as Rıfat Ilgaz, a prominent Turkish writer. “Listen, Kayıhan,” Ilgaz said one day, “You paint well and your landscapes are beautiful. But where people are missing there is no life. You must show your thoughts - your own world - through people.”

From then on, the human figure entered my painting. “I don’t know whether it was because of what he said or just because I was ready,” Keskinok muses. At the onset of the 1960s, the artist began to create paintings containing many figures. There was also an emphasis on local subject-matter: Black Sea weddings, village weddings, shanty town weddings, feast-days. His canvases were filled with real-life moments, including belly-dancers performing on tables, people posing for the camera, and drinkers in Istanbul’s ‘Çiçek Pasaji’ (Flower Market).

During the 1970s, the painter’s style came to maturity. In the “night club” series of his 1976 exhibition, entitled “People and People”, he seemed to reflect people’s non-stationary, ecstatic search for happiness. The theme for his exhibition the following year was the funfair. In 1980, he chose the theme, “the Sailors’ Wedding”.

Space and movement

Since the late 1970s, Keskinok has experimented with abstracting the space in which the figure is situated. The fairy-tale elements in his paintings can be traced back to this era. His exhibitions in Ankara and İstanbul in 2005 and 2006 are notable for large compositions containing numerous figures and treating legendary subjects such as Original Sin, the Three Beauties, the Amazons, the Blacksmiths of Olympus, Gilgamesh and Köroğlu. Other paintings had themes such as Black Sea weddings, Carmen and horse races.

The artist is drawn to such mythological and epic subjects because their fairy-tale, dreamscape qualities provide every opportunity for abstractions of space and freedom and for endowing the figures with the most implausible tricks of movement. Since the 1980s, he has also worked on the technique of superposing. This form of expression brings a conceptual richness to painting, permitting the past, present and future of the same subject to be represented on the same canvas: “the reflection of music in painting,” as he puts it.

Painting after Nazım

Among Keskinok’s forty personal and sixty mixed exhibitions, two others earned the artist well-deserved fame and require a special mention. ‘Rendezvous with Nazım’ was held in 2004 and comprised paintings inspired by the poems of Nazım Hikmet. The artist had previously undertaken similar studies on the works of other Turkish and foreign poets (such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud). The defining feature of these works is spontaneity: the immediate depiction of emotion and inspiration.

In 2005, in ‘The Epic of the War of Independence’, Keskinok displayed his paintings of scenes from the War of Independence inspired by Nazım Hikmet’s ‘Kuvay-ı Milliye Destanı’. Keskinok is old enough to have felt something of the pains and hardship of invasion and war experienced by his neighbours and family. “These pains marked my childhood. That is why I felt the events narrated in Nazım Hikmet’s poems with all my heart. I gave this exhibition my heart, my childhood, my youth. I painted these pictures in a state of excitement,” he recounts.

Well-earned accolades

Keskinok has created around 1,500 oil paintings, a hundred watercolours and some 3,000 graphic works. He has exhibited in Alexandria, Kuwait, Algeria, London, The Hague, Baghdad, Moscow and Moldova. Many of his works are to be found in private and public collections. The “Plane Tree of Art Award” which he received during the 17^th Ankara Film Festival in March was his ninth major award. As we talked on amid the reds, blues and purples of the veteran artist’s beautiful canvases, the telephone rang to inform him of the tenth, to be presented by the Contemporary Arts Foundation (Çağsav).

Indecent proposals

Kayıhan Keskinok has sold innumerable paintings but he has also received offers which he could not possibly accept. While he was working at the Gazi Institute, a friend of his, a violin teacher working at the same Institute, expressed an interest in purchasing one of his paintings, which featured five Angora goats. This gentleman was notorious for his tightfistedness, and was reputed never to have married precisely for this reason. His willingness to buy the 160-lira canvas was therefore a cause of much speculation. Eventually, the music teacher visited the artist in his room. “Mon cher,” he exclaimed, you are after unfair gains!” He went on to explain that he had been to the market, and discovered that the best goats were being sold for 25 liras each. Accordingly, he would pay no more than 125 liras for the painting. His offer was politely refused.

On another occasion, a young lady went to one of Keskinok’s exhibitions and agreed to buy a picture of a woman. Later, however, she returned to the gallery and explained that she could only buy the painting if the artist darkened the hair of the woman depicted. Once again, no deal was done. Indeed, the artist was so incensed that he ordered the gallery never to sell any of his paintings to this lady again. In spite of this, the lady was to acquire a considerable number of Keskinok paintings over the years. Some twenty years later, she met the artist in person and made her confession: “I was very young then and recently married,” she explained. “When I got home, I looked at myself in the mirror and compared myself to the woman in the painting. And I said to myself, ‘I cannot allow a woman more beautiful than me to enter this house.”

( DIPLOMAT  -  April 2006  -  Ankara )