Engraving and Etching by Halim Jurdak:

I am the first Lebanese artist to work in this medium on an equal footing with painting and drawing. I have had a large and varied production and have presented the European, Arabic and Lebanese public with exhibitions of engraving and etching. I have won prizes and have participated in numerous international and Arab World Exhibitions, salons and biennials. It has been my privilege to initiate the first young generation of Lebanese artists into this art, when I began teaching at the Institute of Fine Arts of the Lebanese University in Beirut after my return to Lebanon in 1966.

I consider myself fortunate to have studied this art with Robert Cami at the Beaux Arts in Paris. He was an artist who worked very well with the burn. Working with the burn has been the foundation of engraving throughout history, from Durer to Rembrandt to Picasso to Jack Villon to Adam. This type of engraving has been practiced by few artists, since it demands great attention and an ability to draw with a steady unhesitating hand. Their number has diminished over the years because the great masters have passed away one after the other, and also because rapid procedures and other new printmaking devices have been found to meet the rising demand of the market.

The technique of engraving with the burin involves working directly on the copper, zinc or another metal plate. Another indirect way of etching is by using acid. I have worked in both, in addition to applying other procedures that I discovered through working. Sometimes, I combined two or three ways or even more on the same plate. I introduced the colored paper technique of soaking rice paper in a variety of watercolors then cutting them in different specific shapes and distributing and composing them on the engraved and inked copper plate ready for printing. The result is a print colored in an innovative way. The art of engraving and etching is open and unending in its possibilities, whether in black and white or in color.

The line produced by the burin is special. It may resemble the lines drawn with Chinese ink, but goes beyond them in its quality, substance, strength, and suggestibility.

In the other kinds of drawing, the line depends on the hand and takes from it warmth and vibrancy. But the line that the steel burin ploughs into copper carries the hardness of steel and the toughness of the metal. In spite of this, I manage to give it warmth and pulse. I integrate into it finesse, tenderness, lightness, malleability, the sun and shades, and still manage to retain its distinct fundamental traits of strength, frankness and wiry character.

It was this clarity, strength and dynamism of the engraved line, that attracted me to it in the first place. I managed to activate its melodic and colorful possibilities. I made it resonate like a well-tuned string and glitter like a jeweled color. I included in my compositions a variety of different lines, surfaces, shapes and textures. The white became many whites and the black different blacks and the gray a gradation of grays. Every surface, area or gathering of lines or planes was endowed with breath, light and movement.

Due to such a plastic approach and concern, my work represents, as the critics and connoisseurs believed, an original expression of the temperament and profundity of our cultural and artistic heritage. I was not concerned with being Eastern or Western, but always to fulfill my pleasure in what I saw in front of me on the white surface, of weaving, moving lines and surging colors. Line and color attracted me in themselves. They entice me to plunge into and play in their world. In this diving and playing, I meet my people, nature and culture.

In addition to my dealing with the copper plate according to the generally known convention, I thought of liberating it from being just an etched plate that would be used for printing and then destroyed, or rendered out of use so that no more prints beyond the decided number could be made. In this new venture, I worked on the copper plates themselves, treating them as art works on their own.

This new qualitative venture was followed later by a second venture in transforming the copper plate, about which I shall speak in due time.

Conclusion by Halim Jurdak:

I had developed gradually from academic realism to cubism, to figurative abstraction, to non-figurative abstraction, then to free non-objective forms, patterns and compositions born from the qualities of pure abstract disengaged colors and lines, and what is in the power of these colors and lines to incite in the beholder as feelings, thoughts and suggestions. Sometimes these periods overlapped, other times they went side by side.

In the academic period and in almost all my later periods, I took the human figure as subject matter, for its warmth, elasticity and its ever-living harmonies and cadences. It is the Lyre of Apollo that resonates with the music of the spheres from which it is crystallized.
Ingres said that “drawing is the probity of art”. I would like to add and say, that “the human figure is the probity of the artist”.

I start my abstract work from pure colors and lines, which are as abstract as the paints squeezed on a palette and as the lines scribbled or doodled on a paper, or as the musical notes Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si with which musicians compose music.
I start from a "soulful condition," from a "color and linear mood," from a state of "lust" for colors and lines.

I never developed the habit of referring to a sketch or design or any preliminary notes on paper or in a notebook. The immediate and direct work is my starting point.

I start with play that soon turns serious.
What urges me on, is the restlessness of the artist in man. It is the demanding and alerting concern for renewal and quality. This unceasing movement protects me from falling into the grip of habit that would tie me into a stylistic fashion or make me exclusively dependent on any plastic means or material.

Painting for me is also a sort of bathing in a color bath where I balance between warm and cool colors, between the high key and low key voices of colors and their in-between tonal values. When the painting becomes cold I open the warm color tap. When it gets too warm, I open the tap of cold colors. Sometimes I take either a cold shower or a warm one, according to the seasons and conditions of colors, which are, at the same time, seasons and conditions of the human soul.

In other words, I say: "There is no more a palette here, from which the colors are carried to the pictorial surface, because the pictorial surface itself has become the palette. The visual concept or reality does not go from my head to the pictorial surface, but is generated through the meeting of the two in midway.

Many people find it odd that I oftentimes refrain from selling my art works.
I too am an art collector. And I feel happy and pleased in acquiring art works, just as in making them.

It is my habit to invite my students as well as my friends and fellow artists to visit my studio. Joseph Tarrab, noted this in one of his articles. This is a habit that I have kept since the days of Paris, when we, artists and friends, used to meet in our studios to discuss and talk about things without caution or fear of one another. These visits have left traces on art students and artists, young and old.