Paying the painting and the home of its discerning collectors, the  Kahraman family a visit I was struck by how the bold abstraction of the painting “The Argonauts” and the contemporary funkiness of the painted ceramic bowl “Trafik” spoke happily to the ornate decorativeness of the old Ottoman Yali. Although this is an historic Istanbul home its interior has a fresh upbeat perkiness which keeps the chandeliers tinkling and adds new bloom to the rose strewn carpets. A delightful home for works of art, old and new.

In the loft bedroom where the owner’s budding designer daughter  stays when home from London, “The Argonauts” continues its journey with the ships viewed from the balcony.

Inspired by my visit to the Kahraman family, I continue to Ortakoy and the tranquil family home of Kristin and Kahraman Cicekciler.  Kristin is the collector of the large oil painting Hull and more recently Halic  Lantern. Here Kristin has cleverly arranged carefully chosen objects and colours, bringing a monumentality to the piece.

An intriguing  mannequin, espied in the window of a prominent Istanbul retailer takes on a sculptural presence as she appears to watch over the painting.

The apartment houses a significant collection of paintings, and the owner clearly has a special fondness for each of them. Kristin shows me “Halic Lantern” in its easy but elegant new home among the books and the paintings.

So it was with interest that I discovered that 82 year-old painter Alex Katz, recently exhibited at Tate St Ives is a runner. Katz who describes his painting as both “aggressive” and “optimistic” includes giant flowerscapes as part of his recent work. Pursuing realism at a time when it was unfashionable to do so (alongside the Abstract Expressionists) his is a roving, cavorting imagination with a daring and disciplined “abstract grammar” that lend his images a force. I have been enjoying tracking his interviews, realizing that he was always the footnote in my study of Art History at university. Not unlike Richard Diebenkorn, another long time favourite painter.

Alex Katz talks about painting but he also talks about watching films, dancing with his wife and muse, Ada and about running. After a long day in the studio painting large canvases he rejuvenates by running.
Haruki Murakami in his book “What I talk about when I talk about running” points towards talent, focus and endurance as the key ingredients for both writing and running. AS one grows older, he says it is focus and endurance that keeps one in the race. To that I would add, the sheer pleasure of breathing.

Beyond the studio, the restless surge and hum of the world. The Bosphoros bringing spring storms, and a world immersed in deep colour, purples and greens that start to find their way into the new paintings…

Finally settling back into the quietude of my Bosphoros studio after a couple of months working in South Africa, and then another of orientating myself back on Turkish shores. Finding myself with a lot to absorb, and integrate; preparing for new work to come.

Three weeks spent in the international Thupelo artists workshop at the Bag Factory, Johannesburg, places my feet firmly back on the ground of my home land. Each day we gather early for breakfast, before setting about our work, free of any of the distractions that might ordinarily keep one from one’s studio practice. It is a privileged space where the emphasis is on the working process, one’s own, and the witnessing and sharing of others. And we are privileged to be sharing the space with the studios of Sam Nhlengethwa, David Koloane and Pat Mautloa, art stalwarts of the struggle years, who lend warmth and gravitas to the flux and flow of the workshop. The historic Market Theatre, bastion of anti-apartheid activist theatre, and also incidentally, the venue for my very first solo exhibition “Going Home” (1992) is just round the corner. As we walk our daily ten minute walk, to the studio through markets, past Pep Stores and “Killer Prawn”, only sometimes resisting the allure of potato samosas and the haberdashers and shoe shops of the Oriental Plaza, the street names remind us that we are indeed in the company of good artist souls; the sharply observant contribution of the 60′s writer Can Themba, and the sweet and feisty singer of whom he wrote, Dolly Rathebe. After the workshop, In Cape Town, I will start the search for a singer to take part in “Ek se^” the public performance piece I will be staging as part of the Infecting the City public arts festival. More about that in another blog…

But back in my Bosphoros studio what remains of Johannesburg? A city forged of mud and earth and human hearts; glittery and strange edifices, that angle and climb across a depth of sky; trees made of clouds and clouds made of trees; walking in Fordsburg and the growing familiarity of the neighborhood mosque and its visitors. At street level at night, missing drain covers and missing people.

Recollections of the Bag Factory, a busy cave;, my happy collaboration with long time close friend and fellow painter, Jenny Parsons; witnessing the quiet containment and intricate pleasures of our fellow studio artists, Igshaan and Lerato, and working alongside another stalwart, the indomitable, Helen Sebidi, “Mama Helen”as she is affectionately known. Not forgetting the jiving energy of the Fela Kuti studio next door, or Benan’s beautiful hard won portraits, Akirash’s body painting project, Fiona’s ( also our youtube documenter) quirky bioscope. And too much more to mention here.

Now back home again in Istanbul the muezzin calls me outdoors into the evening light of a rainy Tarabya, threading his call with the colour of ripe plums.
/p>;

I

Meeting at the coalface

An apt quote here from David Hockney I am an artist who is always working. I know some people think I spend my time just swimmng around or dancing in nightclubs. That’s fine. But I don’t actually. I work most of the time. “

Visitors to an open studio are wonderfully curious, even about the business side of things… “How does an artist price their work?” Often visitors are completely unaware of the high commissions that galleries take on an artist’s work, sometimes well earned but sometimes not. In Istanbul galleries routinely expect a gift of an artist’s work from the exhibition. And so an open studio is an opportunity to enlighten and educate collectors or prospective collectors of art.
An Open Studio is also often a space where artists get to assert a hard-won independence, an arena of work and play where they have independence from the gallery, or various galleries or consultants with whom they work.

And with that ,I am off to the Art Fair ,Contemporary Istanbul, to enjoy being on the other side as the viewer. Here I will sidestep the punted mega-artworks, in my quest to discover artists who in the words of David Hockney, “love the world with new eyes”.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but i had hit upon the only thing that matters:
the ability to express an emotion that you first must feel, which is separate from the skill and the accuracy which allows you to copy the real world.”
Here is a lifetime of great drawing, drawings that combine infinite precision with the subtlest suggestion. And all the while one is struck by the humility of the artist. He never stopped learning; exploring…and even in their printed form these are drawings that impinge on one later in the day as one watches the treasured forms of people moving around in their daily lives.
In the same bookshop, the painter, Neo Rauch’s sketchbook, and again what joy to flip through the artist’s most immediate interpretations of his world, alive as his vision is, with references to Art History, contemporary life, the particularites of his culture and his own peculiar way of seeing.
Earlier in the week I watched a video of Ai Wei Wei on Tate Channel. I enjoyed his immersion and absolute commitment to art as life, and his all embracing explorations through different media, but I was surprised when at the end of the interview someone asked him about his drawings. Would he ever exhibit them? No, he said, he doesn’t draw anymore; his mother has all his old drawings…why draw when you have access to so many other media, suggesting in his reply that the time of drawing has gone.

Significant in this were memories of early life; and an early life spent in a family that moved around the world a lot, which of course got me thinking about my son. She also spoke about a mother who pulled her kids out of school if there was something more interesting going on, a sighting of whales, for example.

They also spoke about the hours one has to spend pushing paint around, or messing about just so that when “the flow” as they called it, happens you are there to make the most of it. People often ask me about discipline. Yes, you have to be disciplined and show up in your studio, understand how to optimize the conditions (and this is different for everyone) so that when you bobbing about and the wave comes you are there to ride it. But you also have to know when its not happening, perhaps its time to go and pursue your “parallel practices” whether that’s riding your bike, or playing with your friends. And its often in these times where you are distracted from your real work, that new stuff presents itself unbidden and sends you hurtling back into the studio.

Arriving at the studio, I received a poem from my studio mate Ann’s partner, Seref Hazinedar. The poem is entitled “Kaldirimlar” (pavements/sidewalks) by Necip Fazil Kisakurek (1905-1983). I had given Seref a charcoal drawing, entitled “Passage”, of commuters in Istanbul, and for him it recalled the poem which is an evokation of the city streets and the thoughts and feelings the poet experiences as he walks them. Then this week I have been proofreading the Phd preparation of a remarkable friend, Isin Onol on the theme of shadows and how they are often presented with negative connotations, our words, and images being littered with the need to bring things out of darkness into “sharp light”. This she sees as a peculiarly western obsession, and she cites many examples of Eastern cultures, particularly, Japan where instead, shadow and darkness are valued, and used as a medium of true revelation. Interestingly enough, the upcoming Venice Biennale is entitled Illuminations. All fascinating stuff, and it got me thinking about my own preoccupations with vagueness, perhaps an attempt to restore a charged mystery to the world.

I awake in the city to my favourite kind of morning light on the Bosphorus, ships passing through a bewitched haze of summery mist.

Leaving this quietude my thoughts return to this city, and the sharp edged tilt of its race into some future. I like what John Cage has to say, “It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else. Here we are now.”
But on every bus shelter now, in the city there is an image of a high rise apartment complex and shopping mall, gleaming behind the picture of a happy couple or family, and so, on my commute into the city, buildings keep slamming up into the sky. In 21st century cities like Istanbul where the developers scarcely breathe in their charge towards “progress”, the personal lived experience of the city is increasingly denied as is any creative evolution of living space, all in the interests of conformity. To question this so called “progress”, might even be considered unpatriotic. Along with this systemic dehumanisation of the city, is the denial of the ordinary person’s lived experience of the city; feelings as expressed in Kisakurek’s poem are disregarded. As the city is repeatedly dug up and plastered over, so to is memory. Perhaps painting the city has the capacity to restore humanity to the city in the eye and heart of the viewer, a painting in its choreography between eye, hand and heart may reawaken some of those thoughts and feelings that have been denied; paintings that emerge as a response and celebration of the quotidian life in the city, not the sentimental backdrop that is carefully preserved for the benefit of the tourists, or manicured for the latest advert for cleverly branded “white goods”.

In Greece, I rediscover sacred geomety in the ancient ruins of the Acropolis and then again, in the New Acropolis Museum, a suitably majestic, grandly simple and pristine space impossibly housing the giants of Greek antiquity. And yet there is somehow an intimacy that allows one to rub shoulders with Apollo and Aphrodite or follow the scuff and ruin of the marble in the Equestrian Frieze. From the Erechtheum, modern Athens appears framed by its ancient history, so many forms of bits of white paper, crumpled, shaded in white.
At Delphi the world is renewed in all her light and mystery, restored by these ancient temples and remnants, an invitation into their silence and quiet grandeur. Walking Mycenae rock against rock; the long triangular slope of the opposing hillside and curving texture of olive and orange grove complete the equation. In my sketchbooks, how to capture line and light and colour so sprung from earth and sky and sea; how each edifice, in ruin holds its quiet and sure weight in pillar and post. Perhaps what the late British painter, David Bomberg called “the spirit in the mass”.

Ryszard Kapuscinski’s “Travels with Herodotus” accompanies me on this journey; he writes of provincialism, not only of space but also of time, and how his own travels as a journalist, with Herodotus’ Histories, gave him not only the breadth of perspective of space as he traversed continents, but also, of time, as he lived through the events and story of thousands of years ago.

Faced with Demeter in the Archeology Museum, I feel the reverberations of this ancient story. Each funerary stele whispers the intimacies of death and passage. Birds alight from the marble singing into the silence, and later at Mycenae there is a robin that will not be disturbed from her perch, even by the vigorous efforts of young Tem.

On the platform at Larissa Station, as we wait to depart Athens, there stands a woman silhouetted in the morning light, boots, black coat, with a suitcase. Is the suitcase part of the iconography of being Greek? Of migration, travel? I see it sometimes in artists’ works in galleries around Athens. What if Aphrodite had a suitcase? As she makes her appearance in my notebooks, she has.

back in the studio, at first I avoid my Bosphorous walk and city commute, not wanting anything to impinge on the silence of my memories. On the easel is a canvas begun sometime before. A vague evokation in turpsy paint and winter light, a group of fishermen standing aloft, caught under the veil of their nets.
Enter left, Aphrodite with a suitcase, soon to be joined by her fellows, refugees, travellers, exiles, emigres all on the move, momentarily held.