Paintings by Kubanychbek Amankozhoev
As mentioned earlier, the first artist to somewhat depart from traditional themes and the characteristic formal solutions of the older generation of artists was Kubanychbek Amankozhoev.
The painting "Heat" is a typical landscape image in which the genre motif plays a significant role. The state of nature is revealed through the pictorial texture and coloristic structure, which, despite its decorative nature, is still connected to the solution of plein air tasks.
In "The Song of the Akyn," a traditional domestic scene in a yurt is depicted.
The challenging task of depicting the nighttime state of nature and the artificial lighting of the yurt's interior was solved by the artist with a truthful representation of the tonal subordination of the illuminated and shaded parts of the composition.
This painting was the first to depict traditional folk life as one of the paths in the search for national character in artistic imagery.
The contemporary themes, favored by artists of all generations, revealed fundamental changes in life without a comparative analysis with the historical past of the people.
Such analysis proved to be more accessible to graphic arts—illustrations for literary works and thematic series in easel art. As for painting, within a single composition, the comparison of the past and the present turned out to be less organic and more illustrative, and was usually directly or indirectly related to a particular literary work (for example, the novella "The First Teacher" by Ch. Aitmatov). However, the social necessity to evaluate the path traversed by the people during the years of socialism led a number of artists to historical material, often understood in a domestic context.
Interest in folk life intensified with the general interest in folk art. Thus, this emerging trend, dictated by internal needs, reflected a very important aspect of the development of global professional art, which discovered an inexhaustible source of creative inspiration in folklore.
The schematization of formal solutions, which made academic drawing with adherence to the laws of perspective and anatomical accuracy in depicting the human figure unnecessary, has had a very painful impact on the school. This is still evident in the elementary errors in drawing in most paintings, even by the most talented artists who underwent academic training in their time.
The state of nature and the light-air environment have practically disappeared from paintings. More often, artists strive to express the plasticity of objects, whether mountains, houses, trees, or people, with conditional color in a given palette. Even in those cases (for example, in landscapes) where nature is necessary, they immediately address the tasks of composition not only through drawing, the scale relationship of sky, earth, and various details, but also through brushwork, most often textural, and sometimes even relief. With this approach to plein air tasks, the next step was taken—artists practically completely abandoned plein air painting.
The most persistent technique in creating thematic paintings in all Kyrgyz painting is the inclusion of a landscape environment in the composition; however, the very attitude towards the interpretation of the landscape, as well as towards the image of a person, has sharply changed among the new generation of artists, as most of them no longer consider sketch work as a necessary stage in gathering materials for creating a pictorial image, limiting themselves to abstract solutions of their ideas using the creative experience of that line in the development of painting that places special importance on the emotional resonance of artistic form.
The favorite genre of thematic paintings has become domestic, and moreover, non-eventful, depicting a scene of life in a moment frozen in time, which often results in characters being presented statically, leading to the immobility of the forms of the surrounding nature or a refusal of the landscape in favor of an abstractly resolved background.
The disappearance of air and light from the natural environment darkened the color palette at one time. Blackness was interpreted as a psychological tension of the image, which, in the best works, indeed took place; in most cases, this masked helplessness in drawing, inability to work with the plot, and low coloristic culture.
Painting