Samia Halaby

Indiana University Graduate show, 1963

During her final student days and for a period after, Halaby's approach to painting was characterized by flat color where relationships of luminosity and simultaneous contrast were inspired by the Minimalists and by work of Josef Albers and his book "Interaction of Color." In terms of shape, the work depended essentially on the rectangular surfaces of human life be they walls, windows, writing paper, floors, cards, or gently hung weavings. The variety of scale and placement was clearly an abstraction from ways of examining the world we see. During that short span, Halaby left Bloomington to teach in Honolulu at the University of Hawaii, then moved to Kansas City for her second teaching position at the Kansas City Art Institute.

After 1965, a scientific attitude of exactly how we observe and interpret what we see overtook her. She writes, “I began to feel that I must make a clean, new beginning and erase my teachers and my past out of my thoughts.” At this point, Halaby relied on what she saw at museums and her knowledge of art history to develop her new way of thinking. She would examine Rembrandt, his use of light and color in portraiture and was particularly impressed with the Old Master collection at the Kansas City Museum. After an extended and frustrating exploration, a small orange on a windowsill first captured Halaby's attention and started the new series. This inspiration can be attributed to the painting “Virgin and Child in Domestic Interior” (ca. 1469–67) by Flemish master Petrus Christus in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Gallery of Art in Kansas City. Halaby was then teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute and leading a boldly experimental program for first-year students. 

As she describes her interest in later writing, Halaby tells of revisiting the museum to examine how artists historically treated edges. From her thorough education at the University of Cincinnati, Halaby understood the failures of perspective. She wanted to know exactly what it is we see when our eye travels over the surface of a spherical or cylindrical object, reaches the edge and then jumps to a far background. Finding no answers, Halaby realized that how we see is educated. Over millennia artists have contributed the multitude of small discoveries that created the monument of visual culture that teaches us how to see. This then became, to Halaby, the important challenge as she insisted that painting is exploration not performance.

Slicer Waves, 1973

Helical drawing, 1972

As the Geometric Still Life series had satisfied her curiosity, Halaby found herself at a critical point on her artistic path. She felt that she could explore one of two directions, either focus on the individual and the self or life outside. She tested the first direction by doing a portrait of a friend but quickly decided to embrace the latter. She interpreted the idea of life outside the self as painting that expands its content outside the frame. 

As a point of reference, the artist had purchased several used books on geometry, with some devoted to pipe fitting. A book that showed how to cut flat shapes that make complex three dimensional pipe fittings lead her to fascination in plotting helical and later cycloid curves. Halaby would plot these curves on large sheets of graph paper and then would select sections to paint.

While in the midst of the helical series, Halaby was hired at Yale University on the tenure track. She moved to New Haven, Connecticut, and rented a studio she in the downtown area where she complete her “Helical and Cycloid” series.

Untitled, 1974

While teaching at the Yale School of Art, Halaby worked on the new Diagonal Flight series. The title had occurred to her while watching children play with arms outstretched while running, making engine sounds, pretending to be airplanes. She had been wondering to which direction the diagonal horizons of her new paintings should lean. The children, being mostly right handed, banked their pretend flight to the right. She determined immediately to follow their natural habits.

Although still cognizant of the commitment to pursue the idea of conjugation emanating from the geometric still lifes, Halaby was testing the irrationality of perspective and shading by creating an accurately shaded space that we cannot read according to our educated skills. How would viewers see a carefully shaded cylinder if it extended outside the perimeter of the painting on both ends? The information on the depth of the cylinder would be so concretely provided by the circular ends and would not be visible. The result was that scale became relative and the space of the paintings could easily be read as variedly colored horizons such as one might see out of the window of an airplane. Geometry and the convergence of measurements continued to dominate her thoughts.

In 1979, Halaby felt that she had reached the end of the Diagonal Flight series. Instead of experimenting with new directions, she stopped painting entirely for a short period then painted profusely, most of which she ultimately destroyed. It was an important pivotal moment where she shifted into the second broad phase of her artistic life, that of abstraction. In essence, Halaby explains, it was essentially a continuation of seeing but with the addition of the fourth dimension of time.

Finally, the Dome of the Rock series was inspired by a visit to Jerusalem in 1966. Forty-five degree diagonal lines emanate from the corners while points of diamonds began and ended at measured locations on the perimeter. Here, she added cylinders and textures inspired by inlaid Arabic art.

All Blue, 1982

Prancing in the Vineyard, 1982

Sketchbook page from 1989

Another short series based on investigations the artist did many years earlier is Autumn Leaves and City Blocks. Her focus on the cells between veins in autumn leaves and their similarity to city blocks that she knew in New York connected together formed basis for this series. At that time Halaby lived in New York and commuted to New Haven while teaching at the Yale School of Art.

Halaby noticed that human building was dominated by the right angle but that in the growth of highways and city blocks those right-angled rectangles were often disturbed and thus truncated by the necessities imposed by natural land formations. They resembled the cells between veins in a maple leaf. The ways in which bridges crossed rivers, at right angles then bend according to land formation also formed a part of the inspiration. Halaby determined that her paintings, to be as beautiful as nature, had to grow according to principles extracted from nature. Thus what is unique in this series is that it is based on the process of growth she observed in nature.

Ideas regarding imitating principles of growth dominated her creativity during the 1980s. She began to allow lines and shapes to actively change each other. A shape that is intersected by a line might divide itself into two. A line that received a shape may mirror itself in the shape's outline. Color and composition as well as the paintings perimeter all participated in this process of growth Halaby was beginning to find her way through a new way of seeing and a new way of making abstract paintings, one that imitates the principles of nature not its appearance. Her work became more apparent in freely moving gestures and her more generally more intuitive in execution while her ideas remained strongly structures.

Having been fascinated by computing since her days as a graduate student at Indiana University, Halaby began to focus on the relationship of art to the technology of its time. She acquired a small personal computer, an Amiga, and found programming painting in motion with sound a hugely beautiful and absorbing project. “I could put in my paintings a more complete impression of what I see and hear of my experiences of life.”

Halaby learnt to program and created her kinetic paintings by programming not by using animation software. Her digital paintings were created with the same aesthetic intent as oil and acrylic ones. Instead of adding paint to canvas then walking back to examine her work, she would add program commands, compile the program, then run it to judge its worth.

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  Still from Constructivist, 1987
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  Still from lrw0, 1987
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  Still from Branching, 1994
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  Still from Rhythms, 1994

Halaby in her studio, 2016

Early in 1990, Halaby took a long look at all she has done and concluded that it was time create space in the painting relying only on brush marks as the building blocks of the painting. Early in the 1980s, she had removed shading and perspective and now she removed shape. Allowing only the distribution of brush marks in different size and color to create the space without reference to imagery was both hard and generative.

New references to how we see began to emerge. Halaby often talked about how our eyes shift focus from place to place while we walk and examine our surroundings. Thus how we look and not what we look at became the subject of the painting. As viewers see distribution of brush marks in a painting, they recognize their own habits of looking at the world and in ways that are not wholly clear, an experience of relative space in an abstract painting emerges.

Over a long and fertile career, Samia Halaby has always kept the picture plane and its perimeter in focus as a primary compositional player. She now begins to contemplate its removal. The result was a series of works free of the stretcher. Previously painted pieces of canvas were cut and reformed through stitching. Paint was applied before and after cutting and to both sides of the canvas fragments.  The separate pieces were often treated like paintings in their own right. While aggregating the pieces she often felt inspired by the beauty of how leaves build to make magnificent trees.

Hanging Gardens grew from Halaby's ‘free of the stretcher’ painting where Halaby would cut parts of painted canvas and recombine them. Here, a need to collage the parts led to stitching them. Methods of attaching consecutive parts led to sensations of tree leaves and branches grew. “I was so deeply immersed in these aesthetic exploration feeling as though I was making trees that I had not noticed that the most important principle of growing trees is contradicted by my hanging soft stitchery. Thus the idea of hanging gardens suggested itself.”

Beginning with her relationship with Ayyam, Halaby began to rely on her intuitions attempting to exploit the whole of her experience without demanding that growth be a known process or planned exploration. Echoes of all that she had learnt on a long journey appeared in canvases larger than she had done earlier. This most recent period includes at least ten mural sized works. It is a rich outpouring in pure abstract form that taps into the beauty of nature and of mankind's building.

• Third and Fourth International Symposiums on Electronic Art (1993, 1994) Minneapolis, MN
• Brooklyn Museum of Art (1994)
• Philadelphia College of Art (1997)
• Galerie Le Pont (1997), Aleppo, Syria
• Atassi Gallery (1997), Damascus, Syria
• Sakakini Art Center (1997) Sakakini Art Center, Ramallah, West Bank
• BeirZeit University (1997), BeirZeit, West Bank
• Darat al Funun (1997), Amman, Jordan
• Lebanese American University (1998), Beirut, Lebanon
• Lincoln Center (1998)
• Williamsburg Art and Historical Center (1998) Brooklyn, New York