The Creativity of Sabyrbek Akylbekov

A remarkable phenomenon in Kyrgyz visual art was the creativity of Sabyrbek Akylbekov. His thematic range was not extensive. He was a born landscape painter, possessing a rare gift for noticing and conveying the almost elusive aspects of nature.
For Akylbekov, the most beloved form of creativity was working en plein air. He perfectly absorbed the lessons of his teachers (N. Krymov and I. Petrovichev) about the necessity of harmony in the tone of color planes when working outdoors and applied these principles throughout his creative life. The decisive influence on him in choosing an independent path was S. Chuykov, who highly valued sincerity and honesty in every artist.
Akylbekov was a typical contemplative poet, very intimate—he was a brilliant master of landscape studies. His landscape paintings are essentially enlarged and more detailed studies. Sometimes the paintings even lost freshness in conveying the light-air environment and impressions, yet there is not a single "transitional" study; all of them represent a distinct small genre of landscape, close to lyrical poetry and sad musical miniatures.
The work of S. Akylbekov en plein air is largely improvisational. The landscapes are characterized by a jewel-like precision of the pictorial surface and color harmony, with a gentle lyrical mood in conveying the natural state. In terms of composition, they are simple. Akylbekov primarily reduced the construction tasks to the proportional relationship between two planes—the ground and the sky. The landscapes are also simple in their motifs: foothill valleys in the foreground, mountains and sky in the background. Sometimes, wishing to reflect modernity within the framework of a lyrical landscape, the artist depicted an asphalt road disappearing over the horizon and cars. The depiction of machinery was a complex task for him, but entirely feasible, as the machines fit into the environment; their rigid forms and local colors were softened by the air and reflections of neighboring colors.

He has several studies depicting factories. Loving and well-acquainted with pure nature, he chose factories located in isolation somewhere in the foothills, so that they could be depicted not in close-up, but integrated into the landscape as an organic element. Even the soot and smoke billowing from factory chimneys he painted like clouds—light, gradually dissolving in the purity of the mountain sky.
Once, the artist painted a house-building factory. The rigid volumes of the concrete structure, cement dust, and metal constructions seemed unlikely to serve as a theme for Akylbekov's lyrical improvisation; nevertheless, even in this study, as well as in the painting (1963), the artist managed to extract the subtlest shimmer of pearly tones from the gray color of concrete.
Among Akylbekov's landscape compositions from the 1960s, besides the painting "House-Building Factory," the works "Autumn in Southern Kyrgyzstan" (1963-1964, fig. 117) and "Factory Road" (1966) stand out for their high artistic qualities.
The landscape "Autumn in Southern Kyrgyzstan," in its interpretation of nature and compositional solution, is close to Aitieva's landscapes "Surroundings of Andijan" and "Autumn in the Chui Valley." In it, just like in Aitieva's paintings, the beautiful nature is recreated, and the motif of human presence and its humanizing role in the modern life of nature is distinctly resonant. Akylbekov's landscapes are characterized by the poetic imagery of nature, the tender trembling of its states, and the purity and clarity of artistic solutions.