Tag: environment
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“Karne” (Report Card
Half-finished Prismacolor sketch of the sea, just north of Foça Well, all the world’s school children are onto their summer holidays after getting their report cards for the year. In Turkey, the last day of school is the much-anticipated moment when your kids carry home their “karne” and parents celebrate the accomplishments of their offspring.…
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Art+Fortunes=Art Fortunes
A while back I wrote my list of 10 ideas. Of course, as soon as I posted it, I realized that I had left one out. And it was a really important one, too. It involved the next step in an ongoing project of recycling paper by using it in collages and then using the…
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8 Women Around Town
So, I do remember reading in Howard Becker’s “Art Worlds” how unlike musicians, visual artists don’t have the same luxury of immediate feedback for their work. For example, we don’t perform our work and get applause (or whinging) every three minutes like rock and roll bands. Less frequently, and less immediately, we may have our…
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Oleanders
The oleanders by the side of our house/apt have just started to bloom! It’s late, I know, but we don’ get so much sun on us (a Good Thing for an Aegean summer), and our oleanders are probably not looked after as well as they should be. We only have a few – just enough for some color…
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Indolence…
It’s the lazy season around our house these days. Next door there’s banging – lots of loud, house-building banging – which is unfortunate, because it’s just the time of year when my ‘outside studio’ is at its most pleasant. The banging (and the occasional excruciating whine of metal slicing through metal) has been a good excuse for not…
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“Shoot the Artist at the Right Moment”
There’s some saying I heard once somewhere about how to create a masterpiece: “Shoot the artist at the right moment.” Basically, what that’s saying is that artists tend to overwork, never know when to quit, and in the process of going after perfection, end up fucking things up. I was in the studio yesterday for the…
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A Photographic Interlude
It was when Mel was in Istanbul being a poet that we were able to take over the house in Foça. In addition to some watercolors of the coastline, I managed to take some photos of some beautiful waterfalls inland, up towards Manisa. Getting there was an adventure in itself (let’s just say that anytime…
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Big! Bigger!! Biggest!!!
What a misleading title. But then again, I think these photos are misleading, too. When I look at them, it makes me want to make BIG paintings. Which is kind of interesting, because I NEVER want to make big paintings. But I could see making these big. At least as big as a couch painting. A…
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Heads Above Water
I think that’s going to be the title for my most recent oil pastel drawing in my series of water drawings. When I was finishing this drawing, part of me wanted to paint out the white ‘waves’ so that the drawing would be just 2 disembodied heads in a field of blue. But I kind of like…
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Take me to the river, drop me in the water
Well, not the river but the sea, and I am feeling immersed in it, even though I am presently sitting well above the high-water mark inside a cafe overlooking the sea and Kos. The waves appear to be coming from the west – a reverse-migration? You might not believe me, but the lit-up waves are looking to…
Deborah Semel Demirtaş 