Aziz Basan ART BLOG

  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...