Turan Erol, 1927-2023

Born in Milas in 1927, Turan Erol studied painting in the studio of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1944 and 1951. After several years of teaching art in Diyarbakır with the aim of introducing art to more people and reflecting life in the region in his art, Turan Erol moved to Ankara in 1963 where he worked first as a teacher and later as an academic lecturer. His paintings frequently feature the life and labors of workers, depicted in a style influenced both by the late cubism of his training at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts and by the art informel movement he encountered during several extended stays in Paris. Turan Erol, who was a writer as well as a painter and teacher, sums up his approach to art as follows: “I am an artist who takes notice of his surroundings and constantly thinks about what he sees. I do not have a fondness for ready-made, accepted ideas of beauty. Only my own thoughts can make their way into my paintings...”

Slender utility poles, human figures, boat frames, sailboats, arbors, and domed water cisterns are a few of the motifs Erol has appropriated in his paintings to convey to his viewers the flavors and joie de vivre of the Aegean and Mediterranean. In the majority of his landscapes, the sky is the main element that defines both the composition and atmosphere of the work and gives an idea of the time of day when the moment depicted in the painting is occurring. These patches of sky are balanced by patches of water and land in the foreground. Between the elements of sky and earth are human figures and their buildings, trees, boats, bicycles, and other objects that are part of life’s activities. As for the patches of mountain and sea and the vertical patches of plane, olive, and cypress trees, their presence completes the composition, locking it in place. This is one of the important characteristics of the artist’s pictorial language – a language which especially glorifies local features