Distant Home, Still Lives

"What is the purpose, I wonder, of all this restlessness? I sometimes seem to myself to wander around the world merely accumulating material for future nostalgias."   From Heaven Lake, Vikram Seth 

 

When we were both graduate students in Wales, many years ago, I asked Canan Atalay why her paintings were always gray. She responded by showing me paintings she did before leaving her Ankara home; and I could see how the miserable Welsh weather affected her work, turning bright Mediterranean colors into sad and bitterly cold monochromes.

 

Mountains, oceans, ships and, especially, tulips and symbols of ‘home’ are recurrent motifs in Atalay’s paintings. These motifs may seem familiar but a particular significance lies in the sense of place and distance that Atalay captures. During those days in Wales I recall her paintings, as well as many other things she made, in terms of distant spaces. No matter how small her pieces were, the spaces seemed surprisingly vast.

 

Years have passed.  I am delighted to see bright colors seeping back into Atalay’s paintings.  Yet her images of tulips and home remain blurry and painfully distant, as if belonging to another, yet to be understood, realm. 

 

Atalay has written, “[These motifs] provide the means of expressing and bracketing various emotional states that have led to identifying a sense of location.” Nonetheless, do not confuse these motifs with representations of places far from her home.  Because they are not.  Images of tulips and symbols of home belong to her, not anyone else.  All these colors, gestures and painterly marks are there to form looking glasses through which the artist contemplates at her home from various ‘other’ places. She aims to consolidate varied emotional states; emotional states which have surfaced within in each place. The locality of where she paints always has to negotiate an iconic universality of her longing for home.  This is how her paintings transcend any implication of being mere autobiographical.

Distant Home, Still Lives เป็นบทที่ผมเพิ่งเขียนให้เพื่อนรัก Canan Atalay 

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