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23 November 2021
ReadMy History, Your Past – Is There A Difference
“I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became the voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising.”– Miriam Makeba Ali Atmaca, one of the most sought after contemporary Turkish artists whose work is represented in the museum in Nice, once told me that when […]
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10 November 2021
ReadProtest In Western Art – Bringing It Home, Baby!
I painted this four years after the violent suppression of peaceful protests at Gezi Park in Istanbul, which had started on May 23, 2013, and spread to other cities. Those arrested, especially the women, were humiliated whilst in jail and continued to be persecuted in the courts on charges of sedition, etc. Others, mainly outspoken […]
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1 November 2021
ReadProtest In Western Art – True Or False?
There seem to be two dominant strands of protest in contemporary Western art. In Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger concludes ‘Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’. The Tate article Feminist Art concludes, “Western art replicates the unequal relationships already embedded in society.” John Berger had a lot more to say […]
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28 October 2021
ReadPolitics In Art – Paint And Be Damned?
As my father was a diplomat I spent my childhood in Sweden, then attended primary school in Turkey, after which we moved to Tokio. When we returned I went back to school in Turkey, but I was 15 and had learnt at the American High School in Japan that you could think for yourself – […]
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13 October 2021
ReadMeditations On A Mountain – Dark Matter
I resolved the problem of the distribution of colours across the prevailing shapes by deleting one of the shapes, which was deep blue, and adding violet to the blackness that makes up the negative space in the top section of the painting. However, as I kept the outline that looks like a mountain range I’m […]
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1 October 2021
ReadMeditations On A Mountain – Colours And Shapes
This is a WIP, though I shared it on my personal FB page. The register seems to have appealed to my friends so much so they overlooked the underlying compositional problems. Basically, the analogous harmony pushes the shapes apart, even though there are only two types, because it is not distributed properly. Well, nothing for […]
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22 September 2021
ReadMeditations On A Mountain – What’s In A Name
This is the first painting in the series I started in 2019. I had just got fed up working on the representative images in a series of paintings I did on the wars that at the time were raging in the Middle East. Regardless of their representational basis these paintings already contained many elements of […]
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30 August 2021
ReadMeditations On A Mountain – All That Jazz
I’ve been working on my abstract paintings, entitled Meditations On A Mountain, for a couple of years now. My idea was similar to that of a jazz musician who picks the same tune every night and plays it differently. Likewise I wanted to explore the different styles and possibilities available to me based on the […]
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31 July 2021
ReadHello!
This is my first post, so I thought I’d start with my artist’s statement. Here goes: “My paintings are like a film or a book whose content you cannot correctly recall yet whose feeling you distinctly remember. This is true for all three themes around which my work revolves: abstract, Turkish puppet theater and my […]