The self-taught artist’s works reflect his experience as a practicing psychiatrist.
I like to put ideas in my art,” says Nabil El-Halawany, a self-taught artist who is also a practicing psychiatrist.
That’s an understatement, confronted with El- Halawany’s colorful compositions of quirky images fired with symbolic urgency.
Angels, tunnels, trains, boats, praying figures, animals and birds populate scenes evoking this world and the next, memory and desire. El-Halawany is not afraid of the big themes: life, love, death, striving, loss, the battle between good and evil.
“It’s like a revelation. I find myself drawn to my colors, producing things I never thought I would,” El-Halawany said in a recent interview at his Leawood home.
Bruce Hartman, executive director of the Nerman Museum, was so impressed by the paintings that he bought two of them for the museum’s collection.
“I was immediately enamored with the exuberant colors and fantastic depictions in Nabil’s work,” Hartman said. “His passion for painting is evident in each piece!”
Jody Wilkins, director of the Main Street Gallery, booked a one-person show with the artist as soon as she saw his images. “Waves of Emotion: Paintings by Dr. Nabil El-Halawany” goes on view Saturday, January 2.
Born in Egypt, the fourth of five children, El-Halawany grew up poor, but managed to attain an M.D. in his native country before moving to the U.S. at age 28.
He began life in the U.S. as a dishwasher, and gradually worked his way up to achieving a degree in psychiatry from UMKC. He has had a private practice for 28 years.
But as his two children graduated from medical school, El-Halawany felt his life was missing something. The events of 9/11 proved a powerful trigger.
“I was looking at the damage and it disturbed my mind,” he said. He began making sketches, reviving the love of art he absorbed as a child from his older brother Gamal, who went on to become a professor of art at the Art Academy of Egypt in Cairo, and is a well-known sculptor.
El-Halawany remembers sitting on the couch with Gamal, watching and marveling as he drew. Later, he said, “My brother showed me van Gogh, Matisse, Dali. I realized, ‘it’s not important to do the proportions right, just try to put in the thought. ‘”
The influence of all three artists can be seen in El-Halawany’s visionary paintings, executed on acrylic on canvas.
[block pos=”right”] “It’s like a revelation.
I find myself drawn to my colors, producing things I never thought I would.”
—Nabil El-Halawany[/block]
His feelings about the events of 9-11 inspired a dramatic, otherworldly scene of angels, rendered as brilliant blue and green birds. They hover above a praying man, whose soul, rendered as a white figure with upraised arms, is shown leaving his prone, black-silhouetted body. It’s “going up to God,” El-Halawany said.
The victims were “beautiful souls,” he added, “dead for no reason.” The earth they left behind appears in the lower part of the composition; in the upper left, an orange clock floats in the sky, its hands set at 9:11.
Another memorable painting depicts three dwellings set on stair-stepped platforms beside a low-hanging moon. A tiny figure climbs a ladder stretching from the humble dwelling at the bottom past the comfortable home on level two to the bright pink mansion at the top.
The painting represents “somebody going from one stage to the next,” El-Halawany explained, and the dream of upward mobility.
He attributes the proliferation of symbolic elements in his art to his career as a psychiatrist. A depiction of a figure looking out from a cave represents “how finally you reach an opening.” He portrays the death experience as a tunnel; fences represent “the barriers of life.”
El-Halawany is also a poet, who bares his soul and shares his dreams in myriad verses: “One day I will be known/The sun will rise at my dawn,” he writes in One Day I will Be Known, part of a 2014 volume of more than 80 poems titled Waves of Emotion, just like his exhibition.
“Waves of Emotion: Paintings by Dr. Nabil El-Halawany” opens with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. Saturday, January 2 and continues through Feb. 26 at the Main Street Gallery (in the upstairs banquet room of Anton’s Tap Room & Restaurant), 1610 Main St. Hours are 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. For more information, 816-210-6534 or email piart3030@yahoo.com.
Photo of Dr. Nabil El Halawany by Jim Barcus
