Nabil Kanso - Life and Work - Lebanese Civil War and Kanso

Lebanese Civil War and Kanso

As a child Nabil Kanso grew up in Lebanon. It is there that he got a lot of inspiration, for the time was 1958 and the Lebanese Civil War was just under way. Lebanese Muslims and Druzes were wanting to join the United Arab Republic. Due to the fact that Lebanon was being run by Maronite Christians it made it very hard for other religious groups to have power. Kanso who came from a family of Druze. This made it hard for him and his family to lead normal lives. Also in 1958, Nabil Kanso had to stop going to school in Lebanon due to the war. In his biography, he talks about how he spent much of his time at the houses of friends and families doing sketches and painting to pass the day. The Lebanese Civil War gave a lot for young Kanso to paint about. His painting The Vortices of Wrath (Lebanon 1977) is a perfect depiction of the country in a time of war. The dark grays and black make for a gloomy, sad mood. In the center, it appears as though there is a power struggle between rugged figures. There is one power trying to over come the other. The way kanso uses blurry images gives a creepy feel. While in the back ground it appears as though there are skeleton like figures. His brush strokes are very apparent and give the painting its life even though it is all about death. It is clear that Kanso drew from the time of the war by the way he make the paintings so solemn.

The Lebanese Civil war was not the only influence in Kanso's work but also the wars in Vietnam and the continuing war in the Middle East. We can clearly see this in his paintings Desert Storm. Here he shows women suffering by losing a child becoming victims of war. "The victims," an art critic writes, "are the newborn torn out of wombs or clinging to mothers fleeing natural catastrophes or political disasters." It is noted by some critics that motherhood is important with Kanso’s women; you see mothers at the moment of birth and in death holding children in their arms. The bars that recur from one work to another are sometimes placed at the opening of the woman’s womb. The children suffer with their mothers as fire, storms, or ice intensifies the human situation. People of different religions are united in suffering and passion in these works of art. The noted lack of greens in Kanso’s art marks his criticism of destruction of the environment. Nothing can grow during war. Flesh and blood appears to be everywhere. Water is for drowning, or for freezing. Icicles look like hairy insect legs or barbed wire. The rarely discerned sky sometimes reveals a glimpse of the forefathers like pale blue ghosts look down at their descendants. War has a major influence in his work and has made his work become almost biblical and it's represented in his paintings dealing with war and apocalyptic themes, and the Apocalypse He uses apocalyptic science in his art work making them almost biblical by painting his work with earthquakes, floods, ice, fire and blood referring this to the bible's apocalypse. Nabil Kanso's apocalyptic themes can be said to be linking with the destruction of the Middle East due to war, to the destruction of the birthplace of Jesus and Christianity.