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The Painting Poetics of Vytenis Lingys
by Prof. Antanas Andrijauskas
Vytenis Lingys is undoubtedly one of the most intellectual Lithuanian painters of the middle generation, noted for his expressive spontaneous style. His work is distinguished by its original stylistics, metaphor-rich pictorial thinking and the particular sensibility of the colour scale and artistic form. This sensibility helps the artist to get to the core of the basic human and aesthetical values. Gifted  with a fine sense of colour, the artist is constantly looking for an authentic relation with the objects of his work. One of the most typical features of his personality and work is restlessness, dissatisfaction with the achieved results; he is always moving forward, changing and expanding the range of his world perception and the possibilities of artistic expression.
It is difficult to talk about the sources of the themes, motifs and symbols dominating in the works by Lingys, as they are difficult to grasp, quite often ephemeral, like the mist coming up and dissolving above the lake at his country house. A retrospective look at the artist's creative career reveals that the basic sources of inspiration for him are the rich history of world culture, the heritage of different civilisations, the book culture and the history of fine art. In the words of the artist himself, "creative ideas are born while 'consuming' the world culture and paraphrasing the classics". Already since his study years he took interest in various ancient and exotic cultures, in which he saw the material worth of reflection. In 1987 the artist asserted, "The arts of early Europe, Oriental countries, Africa, American Indians and other formerly flourishing cultures pulsate with a unique spirit and harmony. The creators of the past knew what each form and line, each sensitive stroke on a mask symbolises… The perfection of the generalised forms and lines, canonised columns and other architectural elements of Egypt or Assyria, the refined tea ceremony reflect not merely the ancient cultural traditions…"
It is not surprising that the many-layered character of world culture always emerges in the paintings by Lingys. In some of them we can see a plexus of the magical elements of primeval art, the elegance of lines of the art of ancient Egypt or Assyria, the longing for harmony of Jan van Eyck, the motifs of journey coming from the paintings by Pieter Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch, and visions inspired by reflections on the tragedy of human existence. In other works by Lingys we can find manifestations of the energy of Leonardo's drawings representing the flying bodies, associativity of understatement typical of the lapidary verses by Saigyo and Basho, the refined aesthetic sterility of the forms and images of landscape painting of the Far East, neo-classical elements of Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee's sensitive musical wanderings in the depths of sub-consciousness, and the impressive interplay of lines, colour spots and amoebic forms of Joan Miró and Arshile Gorky. Another, no less important source of his creative inspiration is the intimate, almost sensuous contact with the impressions of the outer world, surrounding nature, the change of seasons, their varying beauty, the rays of the sun, raindrops falling on a tree leaf, silhouettes of birds flying above a lake or a forest… All that is the source of the sensuality, emotionality and metaphorical character of Lingys' artistic thinking.
Lingys has gone a complicated way of creative evolution in search of his unique painting style. Once having discovered a manner of painting and a world of images that was spiritually close to him, he was never satisfied with his achievements and embarked on new searches for yet unknown means of artistic expression. Sensitive to the impressions of the outer world, the artist has always been influenced by his teachers, a direct contact with various traditions of culture and art, which often moved his work in new unexpected directions. There have been plenty of such shifting points in his creative career: as soon as he felt the danger of exhausting his inner resources, he discarded the way that he had already gone with great determination and, having liberated himself from unnecessary inhibitions, kept moving on. However, each of these shifting points increased his experience, aesthetic sensibility and artistic taste, to put it briefly - his professionalism. Therefore, though the prevalent stylistic tendencies of his work were outwardly new and different, Lingys' work always retained - explicitly or implicitly - the connection with the previous stages of his career.
During the first decade after graduation from the academy, Lingys, like the majority of his contemporaries, was strongly influenced by modern French art and the tradition of Lithuanian expressionist art. However, it was not the supervisor of his graduation work, the well-recognised patriarch of Lithuanian painting, professor Antanas Gudaitis, but another teacher, younger and spiritually closer to Lingys - Jonas Švažas, an excellent tutor and a fine expert in modernist art and the subtleties of expressive painting, who encouraged the students to analyse attentively the compositional issues of a painting, to reveal the possibilities of artistic expression opened by lines, forms, textures and emotional colours. This painter of outstanding talent made a great influence on Lingys by the dramatic style of his pictorial thinking, unexpected compositional solutions, ample colour zones and the emphasis on the emotionality of colour. The young artist was also greatly impressed by the large retrospectives of paintings by professor Augustinas Savickas, an artist of spontaneous temperament, capable of constant renewal, which were important events of the period art scene.
Though the early paintings by Lingys were still characterised by traditional figurative compositions, the artist was already in search of new means of artistic expression. The signs of the formation of his original style are evident in his paintings of 1993-94, dominated by massive painting zones and subdued colours ("Four Suns", 1983; "A Woman Caressed by the Wind", 1983; "A Twosome", 1983; "A Guest", 1984); they were painted under the influence of the canvases of Paul Cezanne, French modernists, as well as Švažas and Savickas. At the same time, a gloomier surrealistic tendency reflecting the dark aspects of sub-consciousness manifests itself in his paintings "Christening" (1984) and "Resurrection" (1984), as a counterbalance to the emotional emphasis on the colour zones. Later it fades away, giving way to the tendencies of emotional expressionism, distinct in the works "The Passing-By" (1989) and "The Kneeler" (1989). In this respect, the early work by Lingys first of all developed along the lines drawn by modern French art, though at the same time it retained the links with the tradition of Lithuanian expressionist art that was currently undergoing basic metamorphoses. "We have lost the basis of thinking, philosophy and ethics, without which the soul is drowning as if in a mire. Chaos rules with all its atrocities. I can see it in paintings as well. However, it must 'burst out', giving birth to something new and beautiful. By the way, we get indignant if a plot is illustrated, but what about the illustration of mental states and atmosphere? It is even worse. Though most often it is presented as a positive thing. We still find it difficult to break away from the problems of form." Having realised the dangers of excessive adherence to the single tradition of modernist art, before long the artist began to look for more reliable sources of creation, and embarked on the study of art traditions of various civilisations.
In the last decade of the 20th century, when Lithuania was hit by a powerful wave of post-modern art, Lingys took no interest in its commercialised trend, which attracted many artists of the young generation. He was fascinated by the searches of the adepts of tragic modernism of the early 20th century, and the studies of the many-layered and diverse artistic culture of different civilisations, which had been left on the fringes for a long time and acquired a new urgent meaning with the beginning of the national revival movement. Already in 1989, blurred forms painted with wide expressive strokes, typical of the works of Georges Rouault, the French Fauvists and German and Austrian expressionists, began to appear in Lingys' paintings ("Silhouette", 1990); sometimes they were intertwined with the elements of symbolist and surrealist aesthetics ("He and She", 1990; "Wanderings in Immensity I", 1992; "Wanderings in Immensity II", 1992). After the artist's first visits to the Western centres of culture and art, his attention to the visual aspect of the painting, compositional problems, rich strokes and the possibilities of creating a generalised expressive image, increased. However, along with all this, his trips to Düsseldorf and visits to various museums revived his nostalgia for colour, giving rise to a new stylistic tendency close to lyrical abstraction and poetic surrealism; the spontaneous liberation of colour and the play with the interrelations of emotional colour zones, lines and semi-abstract forms become most important elements in Lingys' works. These shifts are best illustrated by "The Composition in Greenish Tones" (1993), "The Composition in Bluish Tones" (1994) and "Greenish Prelude" (1994). The artist was departing from the expressive spontaneous manner of painting and tending towards decorativeness - this evolution can be seen in his paintings "The Woman" (1996), "The Letter" (1996). However, before long his interest in the emotional relations of bright colours reappeared, which is testified by his painting "The Sun and the Moon" (1997).
Lingys' work took a new direction after his trips to the Island of Mauritius in the southern part of the endless Indian Ocean, and to Japan on the outskirts of the Far East. These trips to the remote exotic countries, totally new experiences, unique smells, plants, landscapes and incredibly intense colours of the sunlit countries imbued with the breathing of the oceans encouraged him to take interest in the phenomena of atmosphere, colour and colour scale, and gave vent to the spontaneous flights of his creative spirit. After the symposium in Mauritius a new attitude to the possibilities of artistic expression offered by pure colours and relations of contrasted colours began to take shape in Lingys' work. The artist recollects, "In 1998 I took part in a symposium in the exotic Mauritius. Two months of uncountable new impressions. The moon and the constellations are the same, yet different. A giant pod of black acacia covering the yellow sun brought into my paintings yellow, black, white and other pure colours". The new sense of space, colour and lighting made a great influence on the range of colours in his paintings and made him look more attentively at the world of non-European traditions of culture and art.
Since 1998, along with the obvious tendency of liberating pure colours, another trend, directly related with the growing influence of the elements of playfulness and impulsive neo-classical drawing, is becoming distinct in Lingys' works. Here we should talk first of all about the well-realised meaning of the spontaneous improvisational element and the growing influence of the aesthetics of poetic surrealism. In his paintings of that period, the colours become fresh, the spontaneity of the painting manner increases, the light colour scale becomes dominant, and the expressive possibilities of white background are used. These tendencies manifest themselves in his paintings "The Pod" (1989), "The Wash" (1999), "The White Lake" (2000) and "A Woman Combing Her Hair" (2000).
The trip to Japan, a country of refined aesthetic culture, made even a greater influence on Lingys' work. It brought him many insights and spiritual illuminations, and encouraged him to take a different look at the magnificent Oriental traditions of culture and art. In the artist's words, "the symposium in the promised land of Japan in 2001 was extremely important for my intellectual biography. Of all my travels, this country has undoubtedly made the greatest impression on me. So many totally new experiences. In the country of the rising sun I was fascinated by the inner freedom of its people, cleanliness and order. Respect to each individual. The aesthetic taste refined to absolute simplicity and naturalness by the traditions of Shintoism and Zen culture… Once I was bathing in a traditional Japanese bath. There was a glass in front of me, behind it stretched rice fields, and in the distance the magnificent Mount Fuji was rising above the clouds like a mirage. Suddenly a small green frog began to creep on the glass and covered with its body the magnificent Fuji. The feeling was ineffable, both cosmic and earthly…"
Having assimilated these new realms of the world culture, the artist gradually reached a qualitatively new stage of creative maturity, and his work was increasingly influenced by the refined, spontaneous and emotional yamato-e painting of the Far East, the laconic Zen art, the motifs of the art of ancient Egypt and expressions of poetic surrealism, lyrical abstraction and Picasso's neo-classicism. All that contributed to the restraint of his painting manner, the sensitive contour line, expressive strokes reminiscent of graphics, and clear colours characteristic of his mature works. Since then the artist has become particularly interested in the compositional relations of the painted elements and the emotional mood generated by the painting. In the best works of this period - "A Woman Combing Her Hair" (2001), "Rice Fields" (2002), "On the Boat" (2003) - he makes use of the emotional impact of a white unpainted space typical of the art of the Far East. "There is nothing more beautiful than a white canvas", confesses the artist. "I would never touch it and all of them - rectangular and square, large and small, framed in the course of many years, would remain beautiful and proper. But I am not perfect - I can't help touching white, the colour of all colours. I want to prove my own colour. I squeeze different paints on the palette. The smell of oil and turpentine spreads around. It enchants me like the desirable scent of the woman's body." The contact with the traditions of Japanese culture and art left a deep imprint on the artist's world outlook and made him regard his calling and his relation with the object of his work with greater responsibility. It also contributed to a more serious attitude to the drawing and the relations of spatial structures, and emphasised the conscious limitation of the means of artistic expression, the lapidarian style and the importance of a single colour range. The influence of the traditions of Japanese aesthetics and art caused the basic shifts in the fields of decorativeness, colour range and composition.
The lessons of the refined Oriental culture learned in Japan were supplemented by the tradition of French culture and art, which has been spiritually close to Lingys since his childhood, and whose strong impact he felt since the times of his studies at the art school and the Art Institute. His participation in the plein-air of Plateau de Maulines-Villon in France in 2003 helped him to rediscover the tradition of French modern art. "The exhibitions and travels in France in 2003 also had a visible influence on my world outlook and work", recalls Lingys. "Paris, its architectural silhouettes, the colours and flavours of this Mecca of art… in reality coincided with the visions of my adolescence, born while reading the numerous books by French authors from our home library, and leafing through painting albums. Everything seemed totally familiar and customary… The atmosphere in this country vibrates with absolutely non-intrusive culture, deep and strong as an ocean… You wake up at 7 in the morning and go to a small bakery, where you buy a freshly baked bread - it's the beginning of real life…" The visit to this country, the direct access to the treasures of French museums, mediaeval architectural silhouettes, the odours of the Paris embankments and the daily life of the French people left a deep imprint on the work of the artist extremely sensitive to impressions. Yet, the dialogue with the works of his favourite artists at the museums and the creative impulses that they provided made the strongest influence on Lingys.
However, the trips to other countries are only brief episodes in the artist's daily life, providing him with important impulses, while the most intense creative work takes place in the heart of the picturesque old town of Vilnius, in the artist's studio at the old University of Vilnius, and in his remote country house at a lake. The country house gives him a shelter from the noise of the capital's life; it is "a fragment of the integral world of living nature, which calms and harmonises the confused and irritated self. There is nothing better than natural environment to help an artist to separate the real values from the routine, into which the chaos of city life tosses him. The country house is the place where the rudiments of the majority of my paintings are born…" The artist regularly shuts himself off in that house, so that he can listen to the sounds of nature and animals so important to him, and experience the beauty of the mist on a cool white evening and the light of the awakening morning sun. Therefore, while standing at his easel on warm summer days and trying to eliminate the barriers between the surrounding nature and his studio, he always opens the windows and the door. "A swallow has flown into my studio and cannot find a way out. It is beating against the glass of the skylights and doesn't understand that the door, through which it has just flown in, is still open. It is looking for an escape for a flight. It happens often, when I leave the door open. I don't like to paint with the door closed, when the lake is extending all around." This relation with the world of nature - listening to its sounds, studying the subtlest changes of its hues - makes the artist's work particularly authentic.
In the paintings by Lingys of the recent years, along with some allusions to various traditions of culture and art, the elements of improvisational painting typical of the poetic surrealism of Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, and particularly the Armenian-born painter Arshile Gorky, are gaining more significance. The artist devotes increasingly more attention to the composition, the interaction of the main energetic forces in the painting, the colours, improvisation and free expression of the creative spirit. His compositions executed in one dominant colour scale are organised on the basis of the vigorous lines typical of some drawings by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and surrealists ("The Flavour of Wine", 2003-04; "Sounds", 2004; "Breakfast on Water", 2005). His paintings are filled with a great quantity of various small objects, details and energetic tensions, which confront each other in their struggle for power in the painting space ("The Letter", 2004, "The Sun on the Moon and the Lake", 2005).
Having realised the value of the spontaneous flight of the creative spirit, Lingys places more importance on the creative process itself, on daily work with the complex relations of lines, colour spots and colours, and the energetic tensions of various components of a painting. "The process of creating a painting," admits the artist, "is the most precious to me. A result is bound to appear, if you follow the way of the truth. The 'organising' of the painting by means of visual language leads to a blind alley. It is a reproduction of various images, squeezing them into your formula." Thus in the recent years, in addition to painting, he has become more focused on series of drawings. Lingys is an excellent master of drawing and has created a great many sketches of paintings, series and cycles of drawings, the most important of which are "Women" and "In the Sauna". Particularly beautiful are the cycles of small-format drawings executed in the neo-classical style in the manner of Picasso and Matisse. Human silhouettes drawn in supple, generalised lines are distinguished by the absolute precision and laconism of linear drawing. The soft and sleek lines convey the expressive beauty of the woman's body in a generalised way. The constant return to the same themes and motifs testifies to the artist's maximalist attitude and his dissatisfaction with the achieved results, as well as to his wish to improve the solving of problems of visual expression.
One more field revealing the many-faceted artistic talent of Lingys is the traditional Japanese lanterns of different forms and configurations. Inspired by his trips to Japan and produced from rice paper and other materials, they reveal his designer's talent and his ability to handle different materials and complicated spatial and colour relations. Some of these lanterns, e.g. "Moonlight" (2004), are complex synthetic art works, created by making use of the possibilities of artistic expression of stone, glass, water, bamboo and rice paper; while the lantern "Ember" (2004) is made of wood, bamboo, rice paper and threads. Some of the lanterns retain their material character, while others look incredibly light and ephemeral, e.g. "The Dancing Bamboo" made of bamboo, paper and rice paper (2004). This expansion of the artist's creative scale shows that he is entering on a new period of his creative evolution, in which the creative process itself gains more importance than the possibilities of artistic expression offered by a concrete art form.
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