An Artist's Transformation

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 Since 2016 when I became a full-time artist, my way of generating new ideas through experiments and in-depth observations gave me unique and interesting styles that I apply in my paintings today.  

1. Pattern-strip style:

Initially after I did solo exhibition of a series of paintings under title “Peace in Abstraction” in the Gallery Underground in Washington DC, I developed a style that indiscriminately defines the space and objects in a painting through vibrating strips. In this style, you create 3D depth in the painting through 2D stripe-patterns which are not just color strokes but are harmoniously coordinated with both objects and spaces in terms of color, value and form redefining the painting through initially unconsidered perception. 

Exhibition feedback and in-person talk with gallery visitors gave me the impression that mostly new generation artist and art lovers, and photographers liked the pattern style in my painting. 

2. Internalizing the power of brush strokes and lines in Master artists’ paintings:

I admire the powerful brush strokes and lines on the paintings created in post impressionism by some great artists such as Cezanne’, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and later that by contemporary pop-culture artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. I analyzed the masterpieces by minutely observing power and strength on brush strokes and lines and tried to internalize the artists’ feeling by practicing drawings and paintings with similar styles hours and hours every day for almost two years. I believe I internalized their perceptions as much as I could and tried to draw and paint with their minds. It was great experience to me to anyway. 

During such self-study and observation, I found some key similarities in their styles of drawing lines and making brush strokes. This may be because the paintings are created by “human minds” learning from nature. And this is the key lesson I learned.

However, whenever I did paintings with such observation, I felt like I was missing myself in them. I felt like I lost a kind of ownership in my own paintings. 

3. Learning the value of line and brushstrokes from Nature

I wanted to switch to my own to become myself as a creative artist. I started exploring something in Nature that I had not noticed before. I started to see something new wherever my eyes go. I started to see everything with artistic mind. Whether it was a table-legs or curved branches of a tree, or any object- indoor or outdoor. I started to explore new facts with curiosity to understand their behavior. For example, when I see or feel the varying strengths at different parts of the same branch of a tree, I draw it on a paper with the same variant feeling putting more strength on the portion having stronger strength. 

Coming through such observation and practice, I also tried to understand in my way why branches of a tree become wavy. My observation concluded that during the season when the tree is full of leaves or fruits, its branches are pulled downward by the extra weights. So, they tend to extend towards ground. And during next season, they again get chance to extend upwards when they become free from the weight of fruits and leaves. During the growth of the branches, this process of extending upward and downward in different seasons makes the branches wavy. 

More importantly, the branches seem to be having higher density at the bent of downward curve as a clear sign of strength they developed to hold the weight during fertile seasons. Why I am mentioning all this is when I practiced drawing a branch with a pencil or a color-loaded brush, I put a kind of strength at the downward-curving bents. I would draw this releasing a pressure from arm through my hand along with keeping in mind the feeling of the strength on such part of the branch. This is just an example, but one of the best examples of my experience. Likewise, some forms of frame of legs of a table in my living room knowingly unknowingly still come on my canvases. 

Along with my such practical observations about Nature and different dynamics within it, my perceptions towards the space and objects on a canvas took a shift, I believe. To sum up with littler elaboration, let me take the same example as above – the tree by developing surviving strength against the fierce weather, molding its branches with extra strengths wherever necessary, enjoying seasonal freedoms periodically, the tree keeps harmony with the environment and surrounding. I understood the value and role of the space into a painting.  Now when I paint, I feel like a kind of harmonious relationship emerges between the objects and the space. And when I draw different types of lines, I draw them differently in meaningful way by carrying their core values, and at the same time letting the space to redefine the relationships between the objects and the space itself.

4.  I realized the value of the Space to yield the creativity in win-win state

When I came through all this practical study and observation, I began to internalize the meaningful sense of what I had studied in impressionistic modern art. I again went back to see with more excitements and curiosity the artworks of Cezanne’, Van Gogh and so on. I spent hours, morning to night for couple of months to reanalyze the clues that have made the paintings “masterpieces”. This study reinforced my self-analysis and I perceived objects and the space intermingled with beautiful harmony of all colors, forms, lines and strokes. I started to reflect that on my canvas. I concluded paintings in win-win situation between the objects and the space thereby letting the space create some of the objects by itself and for it, I just act as a mediator maintaining the values I do perceive on the canvas while creating the artworks. 

In the meantime, whenever I am in a break from creative activities on canvases, I get into my Ipad taking photos of outdoor shadows and analyzing the color combinations on them. This light vs. shadow analyzing activities are never stopped. Starting from Virginia where I lived for two years and in California where I moved and started living since 2018. I found amazing difference in the intensity of sunlight and colors in shadow in these two states. However, wherever you are, it is so interesting to analyze shadows of the same objects, like a plant for example, at different intervals of sunny day, morning and evening and even in variant months to see the difference in intensity of light and colors on the shadows and the surface itself. I also loved to analyze shadows on some great artists’ works specially that of French artists Cloud Monet and Pierre Auguste Renoir. It was interesting to see how they painted the shadows, and to think what colors I would use if I were to create their paintings. I feel lucky to be a contemporary artist of this time as you can analyze and redefine the artworks created by great masters in the past. 

5. I finally landed to the existing phase, to create perspective-free paintings

After coming through all the phases on the path of creativity I personally chose, and having basic experiences in creating artworks and exhibiting my paintings, solo and in groups with French and other European and Chinese artists at different parts of France and some other countries before I became full-time artist (photo glimpses are attached at the end), I finally landed with a concept that had always been at a corner of my mind in the form of question, " if we talk about freedom in creativity, why are we conscious about Perspective?, why people in art world judge if someone’s perspective in not followed in the way they think is correct?”. With that question permanently stuck in my mind, making me uncomfortable whenever I do paintings, I finally started thinking reversely and offensively to overcome the disturbance. I felt enlightened when I thought I should give justice to contemporary arts creating them in total freedom by removing the pre-occupied mindset of “perspectives”. 

I went back to my studio and created some artworks freeing myself by removing “perspectives” on my canvas. When I practically broke through by removing the mindset of perspectives, I started feeling like I am in total freedom now. Without perspective to me is to see ‘as it is’ whether the object is close or far from you.

Although I know Nature has given us such a valuable gift, the eyes, through which we can see many bigger and smaller objects at a time in a wider spare. We are lucky enough to see all such things with wider coverage, covering for example, sunset, sky, mountains, sea, villages and people in one landscape-that we all know. It so beautiful! Howerever, it is a kind of illusion we are in to see objects smaller and smaller as either you or they go farther and farther away from each other. My point to myself is let me remove the illusion and bring the fact in front of you on the canvas and see an object “as is” by keeping its relative size and shape as it is. I found it very interesting to apply the full freedom concept in painting and it is an amazing experience to see how it looks. Reversely, I could imagine now how it would look if Nature has not put us in the illusion of perspective! This thought could sound unnatural because it is not natural. However, it is very interesting to create something on canvases in full-fledged freedom, something like not keeping any thought in mind.

As I was up to perspective-less creativity, The Covid19 came up as the fasest global pandemics ever, spreading and killing people in exponential ratio all around the world. I soon, without realizing how, switched myself towards concept paintings. I started creating paintings with the influenced mind of corona crisis under a fairly new aesthetics, “Ultra Speed”, for the objects travelling faster than speed of light even leaving behind their shadows. In most of my painitngs under this concept, the travelling objects define themselves as symbolic and conceptual counter-coronas that need to act in ultra fast manner to curb down the global pandemic situation. 

All of the paintings I created with the title, “Ultra-Speed” are aesthetics of my main conceptual philosophy “ perspectiveless freedom”, which I in turn have reached after coming through different epochs of my artist life.

To describe precisely that they are perspectiveless, the yellow and blue forms at the upper corners represent the sky and the sun respectively. The sun is not in arc shape simply because relatively (compared to the objects on the canvas) it is just a tiny edge portion of enormously huge circle (spare). The objects are unblurred to indicate you as a viewer are also travelling with similar ultra speed in the same direction as the objects.