Nazan Sönmez: A cheerful gleam

by Sibel DORSAN

Illuminated skies, plants and landscapes blend and contrast in the creative imagination of Ankara-based artist Nazan Sönmez. Bold and warm as these images may be, we owe them to a series of nightmares - the nightly visitations which drew Sönmez back to the canvas over 20 years ago. Born in Diyarbakır and educated in İstanbul, she now happily passes on her skills to students at Hacettepe University.

Poplars, cypresses, trees of every description and of none in particular, standing singly or in groups in all their colours before vibrant air and dusty earth. These views are perhaps the best-known trademark of artist Nazan Sönmez. Her trees are the lonely trees and thistles of the Central Anatolian steppe, yet there is no sense of melancholy in her works. On the contrary, there is a cheerful gleam which stresses the powerful connection between nature and life.

Besides trees and plants, Sönmez has based whole exhibitions on horse-drawn vehicles and brides. Her still lives and portraits are noteworthy in their own right. Paintings such as these now adorn many a private and official collection, including those of the Ministry of Culture, Vakıflar Bankası, İşbank and the Anatolian University. They were displayed in joint exhibitions in Alma Ata and Athens in 1999 and 2000 respectively. And one depiction of a phaeton, purchased by the Culture Ministry, is currently to be found in the residence of the Turkish Embassy in Ashkabad.

A painful absence

And yet for years, Sönmez had not picked up a brush. Her social environment, she says without elaborating, was unsuitable for the exchange of artistic ideas, and isolation had demolished her motivation. Yet painting had been her only passion. While she was still a high-school student, her oils had been exhibited in the windows of the larger stationery shops in Diyarbakır, the year of her birth in 1949. She had received an outstanding grade in the entrance examination for the State Fine Arts Academy, and had graduated in 1972, after studying for five years in the workshops of the famous Nurullah Berk and Bedri Rahmi Eyüpoğlu.

Sönmez was deeply disturbed by her unsought separation from her art. It was Eyüpoğlu who called her back. “I had nightmares,” she recalls. “In my dreams, Bedri Rahmi kept saying to me: Are you painting? Never give up painting.” And she would wake up terrified. “I felt as though I was hiding the fact that I wasn’t painting from him. When I visited Bedri Rahmi in hospital for the last time before his death, he again asked me whether or not I was painting. And I told him that I was - even though I wasn’t - in order not to make him unhappy.”

Early influences

In the 1980s, Sönmez moved to Ankara and resumed her artistic career. Immediately the nightmares came to an end. “If I had not been a student of Bedri Rahmi, I would have quit painting altogether. Him being a good educator and his charismatic personality allowed me to start again.” She is also quick to acknowledge the roles of her family and teachers in the early stages of her development.

Her parents had been aware of her talent since she was in primary school, and had always supported her. Her father was disappointed when he heard that she had opted for the Fine Arts Academy in preference to the Pharmacy Faculty, where she had also had the opportunity to study. But he stood by daughter’s decision. Nazan can still remember her mother telling her father: “She loves painting, let her do whatever she wants. Maybe she will become an art teacher.”

“I was also lucky in that Art History Professor Kaya Özsezgin, who is my colleague today, was my arts teacher during secondary and high school.” Özsezgin was no ordinary arts teacher, and consciously or unconsciously, he made a great contribution to the transformation of Sönmez’s passion into a professional occupation.

Teaching and exhibiting

The artist has now been working continuously since the 1980s, never changing her style or compromising her understanding of art. Since 1985, she has also been conveying her experiences to students at Hacettepe University. In 1992, she was awarded the title of “Competence in Art” with her study “From Impressions of Nature to the Plastic Language”. She is currently teaching Pattern and Basic Art Training at Hacettepe, where she says she loves to work. At the same time, she heads the Ceramic and Glass Department of the Fine Arts Faculty.

Meanwhile Sönmez has held fourteen personal exhibitions and taken part in a total of 33 competitions and joint exhibitions. It was the “Cumalı” gallery in Nişantaşı, Istanbul, which offered to stage the first exhibition. The paintings displayed were generally impressions from Diyarbakır: landscapes, phaetons and thorn flowers growing in the dry soil. Grey and blue tones dominated, Before long, the Turkuaz Art Gallery in Ankara was to play host to exhibition number two.

A style of her own

We had a look at the paintings at her workshop. Some are in bright colours, others in pastel tones. Yet in all cases the beauty of the colours and the harmony among them is unbelievable. Perhaps not surprisingly, the colours carry traces of Bedri Rahmi: blues, purples, yellows, oranges and fuchsias peeping through the brushwork from one generation to the next.

Sönmez has always been an abstract figurative artist. She abstracts from observation, but she places herself outside the realm of impressionism. She conveys her impressions of nature, as recorded in the memory, and as interpreted by herself. Even in her portraits; she does not work by viewing her subject, but starts with whatever striking elements she had retained in her mind.

Stains are as vital as colour to the art of Nazan Sönmez. She creates perspective either through stains or through lines, switching from one to the other every now and then. She works in acrylic as well as in oil. All these canvasses are products of diligent labour, which reflect the organised, calm and principled personality of the painter.

Changing times

Sönmez regards her paintings as the sum total of her own reality - of her dreams, her excitement, her longings, her past experiences and her future expectations. Her new paintings are like variations on or extensions of the older ones. This continuity is not tedious, but can be counted as one of her qualities as an artist. Her interest in particular themes reminds one of the old masters, who were almost addicted to their personal selections of themes.

“Nature remains the same,” says Sönmez, “However, our impressions are forever changing. In line with our changing impressions, we see objects in a different way and convey them with a different interpretation.”

(DIPLOMAT  -  October 2005  -  Ankara)