10 Oct. 2019 Marine time museum Aberdeen

This week I also started to collect photographic references. Spurred on by that I visited the marine time museum in Aberdeen. There I found information regarding the fishing tradition of Aberdeen, the integral connection with sea and trade and how the oil industry played a definitive role in the history of the city both economically and socially.

I would like to talk about an incident that triggered an series of thoughts. While I was sketching a photograph of sailors from 1930s a guy passed by gazed form some time and said “ you don’t want to mess with these guys’. I thought to myself that he was absolutely right, these sailors worked under harsh conditions day and night, they had to struggle both physicly and mentally for supporting their families. And to a coastal city like Aberdeen that was probably the most profitable way.

Observing these men made me realize that all the experiences they had doing this kind of job are illustrated through the harshness of their faces. Of course the film photography is a factor that has effect on the depiction f these men but that does not rebuts the fact that these men look at the same time dirty, exhausted, rough, honorable, robust, hard working and full of life.

It was a revelation to me because I realized that in both, the way I depict figures and the themes from which I draw references there is a latent, or sometimes more obvious, notion that they lived their lives to the fullest, and in some occasions they scared from their experiences even physically.

My figures divert from soldiers to boxers with battered faces, or from lonesome poets sunk on the contemplation of a thought to murder perpetrators condemned for their deeds. All these characters are mere variations of personalities configured by sorrows and hard conditions like the sailors and fishermen on the museum’s picture.

At this point I need to connect this whole thought process with formalistic approach. Ink as a medium is suitable for creating harsh textures, figures are the outcome of a relentless fight among black ink and white canvas. When these figures are placed into clean and plain shapes ,that resemble the space in which the narration takes places, (I am not using the word space denoting that is a specific space I am talking in artistic and painterly terms) there is a contrast, a dialogue, a contradictory relation between the figure and the shape. Figures transcend to the sphere of myth, they become archetypes .