Aziz Basan ART BLOG

"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 he was living in Paris a collector who'd come to his studio had walked out on discovering he was Turkish, saying "your history is building mosques, not painting." Not everybody reacts that badly to Turkish painters. Yavuz Tanyeli,  anothe...

I painted this f our 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   journalists and intellectuals, had since joined them, and continued to do so on the slightest of legal pretexts . Even those who 'liked' the wrong thing on FB, let alone dared to comment, now found themselves in court on charges of insulting the President or members of his family, if not sedition.   What was different was that in the past those who'd objected to the existing regimes had been killed, or incarcerated and tortured by the military coups that seemed to take place every decade - 1960, 1970, 1980... This time the crack down was being carried out by a civilian government who'd done nothing but complain about the...

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 than that though, taking the subject all the way back to the Bible. Since the 70s  women have been taking issue with the roles men expect them to fulfill, spare rib or not. Judy Chicago, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger immediately spring to mind.  Later artists, more specifically Lorna Simpson and Kara Walker lead well into the what I think is the second dominant strand of protest in Western art, namely the colour of your skin. I love Jacob Lawrence's work because I retain a weakness for that no-no, narrative art, which he did so outstandingly well. Of course , reference to past events is not limited to African-American...

  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 - not what was wanted of me even if acceptable at home. As a result I moved to the UK when I was 19 and stayed, having married while at university. All of which has made me acutely aware of issues linked to identity and culture.  But everything social is to a degree also political and that creates problems for the artist. You want to avoid painting cartoons or posters, in short agit-prop, keeping in mind also that German Expressionism used up a lot of ground. Still, fools rush in where angels fear to tread... This painting from 2015 is my first attempt at depicting social issues. It adapts Di Chirico's crazy angles, his obsession with flags and Nietzche. I think the Republic of Turkey suffers from a ...

  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 still dissatisfied - as someone who knows what he's talking about remarked: color field landscape. And that is the problem with adding a figurative evocation or shape to colour fields, unless you draw a line through them, which creates its own problems. If you do so, as one well followed artist does then you're negating the representation and raising the question "why?". Not what I want to do. So, I've decided there are lots of other ways I can use the the reversible outlines of my "mountain". I think these two paintings, which I've posted before, are a good example. Both these painting are avaialable on stretched canvas (90x120 cm) @$1,750.= ...

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 it: I'll have to keep working! When Rothko and Reinhardt went 'dark' back in the 60's, they reduced their palettes to two, at most three colours; more often though their paintings consisted of different tones of one colour. Interestingly, their colours of choice were red, blue and purple. AND they reduced the number of shapes to one, namely a rectangle. I'm not suprised. A dark, almost black register can be surprisingly difficult. I did succeed to a degree in this painting, which has a plethora of shapes/outlines, but follows Rothko and Reinhardt in their choice of colours, without black though - hmmm, can't have everything, at least not...