Arts:

Vildan Çetintaş: A life of sculpture

by Sibel DORSAN

 “It is difficult to be a woman, in Turkey or in the world in general. To be a woman artist is more difficult. To be a woman sculptor is much more difficult.” These are the words of Associate Professor Vildan Çetintaş of Ankara’s Gazi University. Imperceptibly, our conversation about Çetintaş’s works and her personal inspirations was transforming itself into a survey of artistic education - and of the short history of sculpture in Turkey…

A woman for whom women are also a subject, a sculptor who might have been a painter or a teacher, were it not for fortune and the history of which she has become a part. The themes of Vildan Çetintaş’s work are universal and timeless, yet few artists can be as conscious as she of their coordinates in place and time.

Çetintaş settled in Ankara in 1980. She worked for the Culture and Tourism Ministry in the directorate of the State Painting and Sculpture Museum from 1984 to 1996. Since 1996, she has been teaching sculpture in stone, sculpture in wood, and design at the Vocational Training Faculty of Gazi University, where today she is an assistant professor. Her works have been acquired by the State Fine Arts Gallery in Adana, the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, Selçuk University and numerous private collections.

Interviewing the artist at her home, I was curious to know what had drawn her into sculpture - an art form which in Turkey has only latterly strayed beyond the bounds of public monuments. At first, it turned out, she had aimed only to be a teacher. But one step into the exuberant world of art education was to lead to another.

The road to the Academy

“After primary and secondary school I went to the teacher training college for primary school teachers in Istanbul. My teachers there recommended the Buca Education Institute for my degree studies, which followed. I was studying to become a painting and music teacher, and at first I was more inclined to specialise in music. It was perhaps when I met Turgut Pura that my life took a different direction. He was a much-loved teacher and the first person to guide me in the direction of sculpture.”

Pura proposed that after graduating from the Institute, Çetintaş should enter the Art Academy examinations and study in the sculpture department. Although already qualified to teach, she was to take the Academy entrance examination in both painting and sculpture, coming seventeenth in painting, and third in sculpture.

The artist went on to tell me one of her abiding memories: “During the exams, the distinguished sculptor Şadi Çalık, later to become my teacher, said to the assistants: ‘That girl over there with the blue eyes. Her drawings show that she is cut out for sculpture. She must also have passed the painting exams, but make sure she doesn’t go over to painting – she must stay in our section.’”

Educational roots

Training at the academy was demanding, requiring physical and emotional strength as well as mental effort. Differing materials were not easy to master. The support and tolerance of the artist’s family helped her through. Yet today she remembers those days fondly as a “wonderful experience.” She recalls the exhibitions which they held in the forecourt of the school, which they nicknamed ‘Hergele Meydanı’ (Allcomers’ Square). Students from all departments would take part, with prizes awarded at the end. They would all exchange views concerning the various works of art.

“One person who influenced me strongly was Rudolf Edwin Belling. Belling put into place the basis of a system which has had a profound affect upon the Academy. His method is still implemented at the Academy, and it was also the theme of my PhD thesis. It is based on the principle ‘practice - and live - what you learn’.”

Rudolf Edwin Belling became the head of the sculpture department of the School of Fine Art (‘Sanayi-i Nefise’) as a result of the university reforms which became effective on May 31, 1933. Established in 1883, the school was the first institution in Turkey to provide training in sculpture. Its restructuring resulted in the theoretical and technical foundation of today’s sculpture workshops.

The Atatürk revival

Çetintaş is not slow to give Atatürk his due. The founder of the Republic, she says, “was a person who understood the social importance of art very well, to the extent that he elevated the country’s culture and art policies to the level of state policy, creating an understanding of art which was not to be changed according to the political tendencies of the various governments.”

For sculpture, this meant a revival. “The Turks have a tradition of sculpture from Central Asia, and they left traces of sculpture in all the territories they passed through on their way to Anatolia, beginning with the Orhon inscriptions which date back to the first half of the eighth century AD. The Shamanist and Buddhist Turks frequently created sculptures, but under the influence of Islam the place of sculpture came to be occupied by architectural and gravestone carving. Whereas the West used sculpture to spread Christianity, and deepen people’s attachment to it, in Islam there were for many years no three-dimensional figural carvings - in other words sculptures - because of Islam’s prohibition of pictorial representation.”

The Ottoman era produced incomparable examples of calligraphy, miniature painting, tezhip, and other kinds of book decoration and handicrafts, and above all of architecture. But sculpture only appeared in the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz, who had a sculpture of himself made, and decorated the gardens of Beylerbeyi Palace with sculptures of animals brought from France. But these works were confined to the palace, and many years were to pass before Turkish society took sculpture to heart.

Aspects of woman

Among the paintings on the walls, Vildan Çetintaş’s figurative and abstract paintings catch the eye. Around the house are beautiful sculptures spanning the whole spectrum from classical to modern, and from figurative to abstract. All are remarkable for the harmony of their carving, and the balances created by their open and closed surfaces, which contain both a simplicity and a richness of artistic interpretation.

Nature and humanity are underlying themes. “There are many clues in nature for those who know how to see,” she says, “In order to be able to see, one needs both to study well and to observe well. That is the way to reach through to the artistic forms hidden in nature.”

Her early works, like her bust of the famous Turkish painter Eşref Üren, are mostly figurative sculptures. For ‘Head of a Woman’ (Kadın Başı), she used her mother as model, ‘Reunion’ (Kavuşma) symbolizes a moment when her husband returned from abroad, and she created ‘Waiting’ (Bekleyiş) while she was pregnant. As her sculpture developed, we see works which are characterized by geometric forms and a semi-abstract figurative style, such as ‘Shepherd’ (Çoban), ‘Dancing on Ice’ (Buzda Dans) and ‘Children Playing’ (Oynayan Çocuklar). A recent Çetintaş exhibition on the theme of ‘Woman’ also included sculptures of birds.

A move towards abstraction

The female form is a theme on which the artist has worked intensely. In some of her sculptures, which present the woman’s body in abstract, cubist forms, we find her seeking to study Anatolian women, who shoulder all the burdens of life, but are also somehow helpless and hunched. The best examples include ‘Woman Has No Name’ (Kadının Adı Yok), ‘Being a Woman’ (Kadınlık), ‘Young Girl’ (Genç Kız), ‘Mother and Child’ (Ana Çocuk), and ‘Nude’ (Çıplak).

Recent works display a clearer shift towards the abstract. “Nowadays there is a return to conceptual art,” Çetintaş observes. “The abstract, in my view, is a form for presenting things which occur in nature and in ideas, and for interrogating the world of the artist’s experience, and for the sculptor to create objects of his or her own.”

At the time of her graduation, the sculptor experimented with the then newly-developed, “concrete plastering technique” for her 1.70 metre ‘Children Playing’. Six personal exhibitions and more than thirty competitive and joint exhibitions later, she is still experimenting – this time with the combined use of marble and bronze.

(DIPLOMAT  -  November 2005  -  Ankara)