Artist Focus: Ebru Arslan

Hello, I'm Ebru!

I came to tell you a little bit about myself. This is my workspace. I am one of those who like to work in the morning. If there is the smell of tea tinkling on the stove and cookies in the oven, I work very efficiently My mother embroidered the canvas you see on the wall when she was young. My orange typewriter is my most meaningful gift. My favorite flower is the sunflower, the thistle in the background... In front of me are the books I will read, my reading diary... 

As you can see, I love being here, producing here, gathering everything I love around me. Then comes drawing, reading, writing. That is the most beautiful part.

Brush strokes, scraps of paper and, if I'm lucky, a good story! All this is the basis of my drawings. I don't like the feeling of a perfect, immaculate drawing. A crooked sun, a chubby cloud and all the brush strokes that are visible, I do it on purpose. 

As one grows up, one adjusts one's dreams. He says, 'This will do, give this up'. He sets corners for himself. These corners get sharper as you get older. Maybe that's why I do the opposite in my drawings. More vivid, more colorful, smiling with its flaws and strokes...

My graduation project was about longing for the past. In my thesis, I researched the impact of culture on design. As such, my study room became no different from a bookshop. Every new information made me more curious about the old. First editions of books, letters and photographs of people I never knew, old matchboxes, old fashion magazines... 

I like imagining how people feel, reading the unique interpretations of magazines, being enchanted by the delicacy of designs, writing happy endings to letters, lamenting that 'old book covers were more beautiful'. And then what happened?

I met collage!

It felt great to cut papers to my heart's content and put them together with completely different pieces. The good part is that you are free! The pieces are beautiful and belong wherever you want. 

"Hope is a tree 

It envelops the skies"

I don't remember the muses saying "we are here" while I was sitting lazily. I think when a person is interested in something, an idea comes from everywhere they look.

If you ask me what I look at the most, I would say books. The thought of "How can I color this sentence, how can I give it a character?" excites me.

I love this series that I created based on the question "What does my anxiety look like?" An anxiety that walks around with a gray cloud over its head and that I am always hand in hand with. Drawing is a magical thing. Whatever you dream of happens with a pencil.