Water, the essential source of life has always been a universal symbol for our flooding fears. Yet, with the sea, artists feel united with nature. The sea welcomes us as an artistic element that expresses yearning, freedom, excitement, melancholy and happiness. The sea, with different technical, color and stylistic expressions has always had its effect on us. In the act of creation, it sometimes embraces our fears, sometimes welcomes our salvation. We sway in its tranquility or sucked in its whirlpool to face ourselves in its abysses.

The sea has been a symbol of gods, creatures, and thus life itself since the time of mythology. Everything about the sea, its shores, harbors, fish and fishers has become an object for art in lyrical or abstract forms.

The surface of the sea has been studied in the history of art thoroughly. However, the deep sea and its exotic richness could only be seen in photographs and documentaries. The reason I chose the deep sea as a theme is my desire to depict the unknown features of the sea and aspiration to find different visual effects. What is important is the ambition to pursue unusual but contiguous visual effects that are formed with unusual reflections. These reflections produce various visual reasons with different styles in each picture, in addition to producing compositions similar in colors and textures.

In my works, the incipient forms emerge with my collages. The themes of my collages in addition to deep sea creatures and my own creations, also include daily objects. This is the most difficult but most entertaining part of the act of creation; but, transforming collages onto canvas is just the beginning of the journey. Since growing an idea during the process of creating rarely goes as planned as in any other creative work, collage is just the beginning in my paintings. As the theme starts to form, the pains of labor, anxieties for color, form, texture and harmony emerge. The concern for resolving these problems with an artistic consistency and a wanting to become original by expressing familiar objects in an abstract way have always been my goal.

BERRIN ILHAN
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