WORDS AND COLORS

A NOTE WRITTEN AS A POEM TO BESIK AND LEVAN KHARANAULI

Ketevan Kokozashvii

Above Tianeti, six rivers flow from Borbalo, one of the Caucasus mountains. Three of these rivers descend into Georgia. They are places of mysticism linked with supernatural forces, myths, a coexistence of fairytales and reality, and the hunting ground of Kopala and Iakhsari, as well as that of the Devs. This is the starting point of a common, absolute cosmic world, the examination, understanding and absorption of which require more than “one Above Tianeti, six rivers flow from Borbalo, one of the Caucasus mountains. Three of these rivers descend into Georgia. They are places of mysticism linked with supernatural forces, myths, a coexistence of fairytales and reality, and the hunting ground of Kopala and Iakhsari, as well as that of the Devs. This is the starting point of a common, absolute cosmic world, the examination, understanding and absorption of which require more than “one day, one year, one life”. Perhaps this is the reason why the river seems to rise from the melted snow of the Borbalo, and its flooding energy strikes a simple home sitting at the foot of the mountain. Here, colors have become words, and words – colors. Here, Besik Kharanauli rewrote poetry, and Levan Kharanauli expressed everything and every color through his paintings. This pristine and deep world full of spirituality is an inexhaustible phenomenon with its countless stories and colors, and it feels like this place demands a varied way of being felt – words or colors alone wouldn’t have been enough. The center of their world is here, the origin of the world, of thought, creation, freedom, and the fundamental essence of “poetic nature and creative nature” (B. Kh).

The Kharanaulis

Besik Kharanauli, who found poetry in everything... According to him, there’s a reason for poetic madness everywhere for a poet. In that order of things, in the dialectic perspective of existence, in the cycle of causes and effects in which everything is already “pretedetermined and connected”, he shuffled all of it and created his own poetic order from this chaos. His whole oeuvre is one big poetic novel, and the characters are childhood, youth, and maturity, memories and dream visions, love and love again, as the foundation of the world, tears and joy, wonder at existence and at every dawn, and together with all that – “there are also ineffable feelings”. As for Levan Kharanauli, he expresses all he has to say through art,colors, and the brush. Everything around him, everything he holds dear, everything he felt, experienced, and everything his eyes have grasped – he paints it. In his artistic realm, one feels a joy blended with light sorrow with an array of colors from yellow to black, from white to brown, with a gradation of various blue tones. Here, one can see that his art comprises, and, at the same time, can exhibit its poetic reflexion, and there is a clear dialogue with poetry in Levan Kharanauli’s canvasses. This can be felt in every line, every stroke, in the harmony of shadows or light, in the soft, gradual or harsh shifts in color, as “poetry is both full of words and wordless, it is also tactile... it is with everything it encompasses...”

I called Levan Kharanauli during one of his exhibitions. I wanted to meet him and have a small conversation. He told me that he was very tired, and that we should do it another time. I didn’t bother him again, I didn’t want to insist. He said that he hadn’t seen his father for a very long time too before that day – when someone tells you this, you just

can’t insist. But I did meet him on Rustaveli Avenue, in the Blue gallery, through his paintings – what more can a painter say than his paintings?

The themes of Levan Kharanauli’s canvasses include portraits, landscapes, still lifes, various circumstances and character. At the exhibition, portraits hold a particularly important place. The painter’s interest in this field is manifold: family members and friends, and a whole series of self-portraits. “What isn’t outside is in a person’s soul”,  and the portrait’s soul is to be found in the eyes. Perhaps this is why, as he puts it himself, he starts painting portraits with the eyes. It is precisely in the latter that each thought is expressed, the movements of a human’s heart, their psycho emotional world. The eyes tell the whole story, everything that there is to say, they convey the whole inner fluctuations.

Grandma and mother

“You cannot choose where you go in the past”, because it is one whole where recollections are kept, it’s just that there are different frames imprinted in the memory. “I created my mother, my grandma, myself, this is my past...” Sometimes, a second here can last more than a minute or a year, because that one second frame encompasses and provides a lot more than others. Besik Kharanauli brought the motherchild connection to a whole new poetic level, transforming it into a completely distinguished phenomenon. Reserve, reverence, great love, the most human and authentic feelings, the most satisfying and absorbing memories appear in what one has to say to one’s mother

or what one doesn’t tell her. There, in that sacred time and space, the wish to be together again appears, to gently rock in the sun and in the air again… At that moment, the poet becomes a child again, the limits of time disappear, and the past and present aren’t distinguishable anymore, they become intrinsic parts of one another. There is a particular feeling of intimacy when he uses the second person:

“You remember the time, / When to please your heart, / I wrote poems / To the purple moon at our window…”

The whole childhood joy, pleasure and harmony of the Kharanaulis (father and son) can be seen in their relationship to their grandmas. In this case, I will single out Levan’s portrait. His grandma was his friend and confidant, his biggest supporter, and one can feel the amount of love and warmth that was put in painting this portrait. It depicts an old, grey-haired woman eroded with wrinkles, who, as the author said, was already indisposed at the time.

On the portrait, naturally, the most important is the face as a whole and each of its details, but my attention was first drawn to her hands, her thin, weakened, melted long fingers gripping the handrail, as if she were leaning on it. This is the hand of a former Georgian language teacher, who also accomplished thousands of different tasks in the village. Have you seen Pshavian women? Vegetables, cattle, butter, agriculture, weaving – who knows how much these hands have worked. These bony, arched lines that couldn’t be stinged by nettle, and with their “magic fingers,”, would often reap in the Spring, and then, later, gather blackberries or peel quince to prepare a jam.

The face is sad, it doesn’t contain any trace of happiness, but when her grandson was painting it, she was already weak, and perhaps she was happy inside, and who knows how frail she was in this joy. The eyes are very expressive, and depict ancient times, troubles and woes, the experience of a whole life, the difficult and harsh conditions of living in a mountain village, and “offence faded in beautiful eyes”. The lips are sealed, as if they didn’t have the strength to utter words anymore, or if something was left unsaid. “She cannot talk easily about the earth, life, winter or spring…

The grieving appearance of the portrait is underlined by the strokes of her attire and folds, the whole environment, objects, ottoman, carpet, and the spectrum of colors.

Getting to Know Oneself

According to Besik Kharanaulis own words, people move to know themselves. Because of this or that, they move to the city, but they carry the embers, traditions and the magical folklore of theirmythological ancestors, the language in which they grew up – their whole existence is encompassed in the Verb. They are not people, but wind, they can go wherever they want and come back; they are wind, the companions of the field, they wed the field.

As for Levan Kharanauli, it is the contrary – he moved for several years in the village. Here, people see every living and non-living being differently. Here, reality, the real world is closer, it appears in all of its glory, and it naturally enters in the lives of humans, without any forcing. Here, the painter has many “likeminded” beings, stories of freedom, sincerity, purity, nature, and loyalty. Here, there is space to think, to reflect, to get deeper into oneself. The dust on the road of the village is warm, and the painter recreates oneself and his harmony of colors there.

Getting empty and refill – this is the whole essence of creation, and the main dice roller turned out to be life itself, with its manifold and variegated characters.