The creativity of Gapar Aitiev in the 1960s and 70s was exceptionally fruitful: it was the peak of his landscape artistry. For Aitiev, as well as for S. Chuykov and other artists of the older generation in Kyrgyzstan, the foundation of the creative process was the work on plein air studies, which, due to their meticulous execution, could be equated to paintings, and often surpassed them in freshness of painting and emotional resonance.
For his compositional landscapes, Aitiev typically used a single study, in which the main spatial tasks, color and tonal relationships were already resolved. In his landscape paintings, the artist monumentalizes lyrical motifs through the size of the canvases and a clearer spatial solution, always alive and musically organized by linear and color rhythms. The evolution of his work went from genre to "pure" landscape. While in the beginning genre motifs were the basis of the artistic image, gradually the genre began to play a subordinate role to the landscape, although it continued to carry significant meaning and narrative weight, giving nature paintings a sense of habitation and warm "home" comfort.
Aitiev was the most consistent proponent of tonal painting among all Kyrgyz artists.
A master of precise tonal relationships, the artist managed to impart natural authenticity and a delicate rhythm of interdependence to the planes, horizontally positioned on the rectangle of the canvas. His compositions are constructed strictly and harmoniously, everything in them is measured in scale and form. The equilibrium achieved by the artist between the weight of the earth and the weightlessness of the air, between the immobility of forms and the measured movement of their interrelations in mass and light-shadow, creates a poetry of thoughtful contemplation and calm imagery.
The master felt admiration for nature while contemplating the living picture of a freshly plowed field with sunny glimmers on the turned-over clods of earth ("Autumn in the Chui Valley"). This feeling of love and respect for the land, which not only feeds us but also elevates our spirit, Aitiev conveys to the viewer emotionally, demonstrating great professional skill. The painting resonates with his study "Shimmering Lake" (1960), in the motif of the play of sunlight, as well as the study-like resolution of spatial tasks and the immediate transmission of the joyful, exultant state of nature. The study "First Snow" (1964) is also close in mood to these works. In these pieces, the artist managed to capture the transitional states of nature and convey his feelings.
Aitiev's work on studies is methodologically no different from that of S. Chuykov. Belonging to the same generation, they served common ideals, although their embodiment in Aitiev's work was less passionate, which made his studies calmer, more contemplative in mood, and more diverse in motifs of nature. He was interested in fleeting, quickly disappearing states, which gives his studies a special tender expressiveness.
If for Chuykov, study work was always subordinate to the conceived painting, Aitiev viewed the study as an independent form of landscape creativity.
For Aitiev, the autonomous expressiveness of the brushstroke is insignificant, as the artist did not strive for its independent beauty and magical life alongside other strokes, which together create an inevitable tension, as in Chuykov's work; for Aitiev, the result is important — the calm coherence of all components of the pictorial form. He places great importance on the light gradation of color — the main carrier of the idea of natural beauty expressed by the artist. The formal program in Chuykov's studies is close to Cezannism, while Aitiev's aligns with the Krymov line.
A good draftsman, Aitiev solves the tasks of spatial characterization of the landscape through drawing, yet it is the tonally developed color combination that imparts a particular mood to the landscape image.
Aitiev's studies are characterized by wholeness, harmony of perception, and reproduction of nature in its integral existence while preserving all shades of transitional states.
If in the 1950s Aitiev painted works combining genre motifs with landscapes, in the 1960s and 70s he sharply delineated the tasks, creating thematic paintings such as "Shepherds" (1961), "In Defense of the Soviets. 1920s" (1978), a portrait gallery, and a cycle of "pure" landscapes.
The transitional position from genre to "pure" landscape is occupied by the painting "Outskirts of the State Farm" (1966), in which the genre motif is still strong, dictating the genre interpretation of the landscape environment. Among the best paintings in all Kyrgyz landscape painting are "Evening in Southern Kyrgyzstan" and "Surroundings of Andijan".
"Evening in Southern Kyrgyzstan" is a strictly constructed composition, where a row of mulberry trees on one side and the "point" of the setting sun on the other act as peculiar curtains, playing an active role in revealing the image and not limiting the space. The painting recreates a hot, harmoniously clear southern landscape. And although in the cultivated cotton fields and women's figures one can easily recognize the present day of Central Asia, much in the painting reflects the eternal earthly existence with its constantly recurring pre-sunset hot evenings, with women returning to the hearth after working in the field. The haze of heated air envelops the whimsical outline of ancient mountains.
This painting is distinguished from Aitiev's other landscapes by a more decorative solution of color.
The desire to convey the transient movement of life in nature and human existence, purified of particulars, is characteristic of Aitiev's best landscapes,
The painting "Surroundings of Andijan" synthesizes much of the artist's life and creative experience. It not only reproduces a beautiful valley, cultivated by humans for cotton fields, but also encompasses a vast space, freely breathing, as if receding into the distance and returned by a ridge of mountains closing the horizon. This painting is characterized by a clear compositional and spatial construction, wholeness of color solution, and an epic measured rhythm created by the perspective of fields melting in the haze of evening air and the outline of mountains.
The contemplative-poetic attitude towards nature is conveyed with particular tenderness by the artist in the painting "Silvery Valley," in which all contours of forms seem to dissolve in the purity of high-altitude air. The transparent evening sky with the pale crescent moon, combined with the motif of half-ruined mausoleums, evokes a light sadness and sets the mood for reflection. The painting is executed in a close range of soft tones.
The immediacy in conveying his impressions of nature, characteristic of the artist's landscape creativity until the mid-1960s, is replaced by introspection, focused reflection on life, its enduring value over time, which led to a noticeable change in the choice of depicted motifs and the entire imagery system of his works created in the late 1960s and 70s. The works exhibit tension, although the artist's inherent sense of harmonic equilibrium as the foundation of the beautiful remains.
The artist began to paint fewer studies, paying more attention to working on paintings in the studio based on previous experience and referring not so much to live observations of nature as to previously unused studies from different years.
In the landscape paintings, the formal program became more distinct, which manifested itself in the nature of compositional constructions and the predetermined color solutions.
Living in a mountainous republic, the artist rarely paints mountains up close. Typically, they close the horizon of valleys or Lake Issyk-Kul in his paintings, as they are habitually seen by the eye of a valley dweller.
In those paintings where Aitiev presents mountains up close, he emphasizes their grandiose majesty in a somewhat alienated state from humanity. Moreover, he paints not rocky mountains with their cloud-piercing heights and might, but hills heaved by internal tectonic forces, rising in steps to distant peaks.
"Tandoor in the Field" is painted from a study from 1944. Like most works from this period, this painting results from questions about the meaning of fleeting life. Painted in a close tonal range of pink-lilac-blue hues and depicting strangely shaped structures with blurred contours that gradually draw the gaze into the expansive space behind them, this painting evokes an indefinite feeling of anxiety and humility, which evidently was the goal in working on the image.
"Old Kyshtak" is painted from a study from 1946. This carefully considered painting, developed over many years, expresses love for Kyrgyzstan from his childhood and youth, a love enriched by the experience of 190 years lived. In this work, the artist managed to convey, with a subtle understanding of pictorial wholeness, the deeply felt sense of tenderness and sadness.
"Landscape" (1977) is traditional in motif for Aitiev. The singer of Issyk-Kul, to whom the artist dedicated a series of excellent paintings and studies, conveys the nature of Issyk-Kul in blue, without disturbing its color richness and diversity.
If one looks closely at the painting, it can be seen that it is entirely built on the color blue, taken in different tonalities.
Blue sky, blue lake, blue mountains with blue peaks, blue shadows in the coastal grasses. At the same time, the blue color, leading in the creation of the image of Issyk-Kul, everywhere retains material definiteness — the sky is airy and transparent, the water is dense and glossy, the melting mountains on the distant shore are plastic, the grass is green despite the coolness of the blue shadows. This landscape most clearly testifies to the artist's ability to solve the formal program, subordinating it, however, to the expression of the truth of living impressions.
In G. Aitiev's landscape paintings, the coloristic and compositional-spatial solution, along with a carefully considered motif, is an important creative problem.
Aitiev, in his work, is connected with the classical Russian tradition of landscape painting, but he is a truly national artist in his aesthetic perception of various life phenomena and deep connections with the spiritual culture of the Kyrgyz people.
In Aitiev's work, thematic composition does not occupy an equal position with the landscape, although the artist himself attributed great importance to it. He particularly long contemplated the idea for the painting "In Defense of the Soviets. 1920s," intending it as a kind of group portrait of the Kyrgyz poor who rose to fight for a brighter life.
The revolution was a vital necessity for these people.
In the 1970s, Aitiev worked a lot and purposefully in portraiture. He hurried to capture the likeness of his contemporaries, mostly his peers. In terms of internal task, this gallery was connected for the artist with the painting "For the Power of the Soviets. 1920s." In the portraits, attention was not always given to solving purely artistic tasks, which is why many of them are resolved somewhat unambiguously in compositional and coloristic terms. The fact that Aitiev decided to create a portrait gallery of his contemporaries indicates an intention to expand the theme of humanism, transferring it from the realm of landscape lyricism to the realm of direct depiction of human personality.
If the early portraits had a chamber and study character (portraits of poet A. Osmonov and artist S. Akylbekov), now his portraits exhibit features of deeper psychological insight and social characterization.