Arts

Mustafa Ayaz: The fruits of sincerity

by  Sibel DORSAN

Enter the studio of Mustafa Ayaz: a world of erotic women and cartoon strips, of chaos and composition, of work and rewards, of self and others. This is real life, in which poor boys become great artists - and go on to make their dreams come true.

Stacks of old brushes and empty paint tubes… Scattered here and there, sculptures of women of which even professional sculptors might be jealous… New paintings and a sharp smell of turpentine... Seated in his workshop, Mustafa Ayaz toils over the works which are destined to feature in his upcoming exhibition. At the same time, the famous artist is engrossed in the plans for the “Mustafa Ayaz Museum and Cultural Centre” - a dream he has elaborated since his youth, and which is now about to come true in Ankara’s Balgat neighbourhood.

Tired but happy, Ayaz talks eagerly about the Cultural Centre which is to be completed in 2007. And in almost the same breath he revisits – via all the twists and turns of his illustrious domestic and international career - the difficulties of his childhood in Eastern Anatolia.

Self-portrait

Amid the financial problems of his family, it was the Erzurum Pulur Village Institute which provided the artist-to-be with the first steps of his stairway to success. The village institutes (‘Köy Enstitüleri’) were set up in the 1940s to provide the people of rural Anatolia with a progressive and practical education. Ayaz is a great believer in the importance of the role they played. In Pulur, he was successful at both painting and mathematics. When his teacher channelled him towards Istanbul Çapa Primary Education School, his future course was set: the path of art.

The construction of the Cultural Centre, one senses, is Ayaz’s way of repaying a spiritual debt to his country. Could this be the reason for his contentment and excitement? At the entrance to the Museum, he plans to place a large-scale sculpture of a woman, his most familiar theme. There will also be a sculpture of himself, to be executed in an avant-garde style consistent with the thrust of his career, making use of all those used paint tubes and brushes, which he has been collecting for the past nineteen years.

Farewell to academia

After graduating from Çapa, the young Ayaz entered the Painting Department of Ankara’s Gazi Training Institute in 1960, from which he graduated in 1963. Three years later, he returned to the Institute as an assistant. He was to work here for the next eighteen years, a period during which his own style developed and his output grew. Between 1984 and 1987, he lectured in the Painting Department of the Fine Arts Faculty of Hacettepe University. He became a professor in 1987 and was later appointed to the Fine Arts Faculty of Bilkent University. Just a year into the job, however, he reflected that his long years of teaching were enough, and settled for the creative opportunities of his workshop.

Ayaz produced figurative works at Çapa but turned to abstract paintings as a student and throughout his early years at Gazi. Unfortunately, he has in his possession none of the paintings which he undertook before 1972. He argues that reality can only be emphasised through the use of abstract forms, and recalls that his canvasses of that period were concrete in essence if abstract in the formal sense.

Traces of calligraphy

Figurative expression re-appears in Ayaz’s work as of the mid-1970s, within a linear approach. In his paintings of the 1972-1982 period in particular, he is observed to deform the figure. In his canvasses executed after 1984, there seems to be a dichotomy, with a very evident contrast between ‘modelé’ (volume) and line. From time to time his paintings are marked by an approach which favours the use of lines or colour or stain modulation rather than the deployment of volumes.

Ayaz’s designs are no less significant than his colour paintings, with which they share a common language. His designs sometimes resemble cartoon strips or caricatures. He loves designing, believing that it enables him to convey his spiritual world – his fears, joys, sorrows and expectations, his views about art and life, and the events which affect his daily life - in a direct and simple way. He has created a total of 10,000 designs. His use of line extremely powerful, and among his designs are some which could easily be taken for a Picasso or a Matisse. However, the greatest influence appears to be the calligraphic strokes and abstractions of Ayaz’s teacher Adnan Turani.

Painting life

As for the paintings, the main motif is generally a nude or concrete object created with the modelé method. Subsidiary elements tend to consist of line-drawn human or animal figures or symbolic forms. These figures are sometimes located within a geometric background; sometimes placed side by side, or one behind the other, in an approach to composition that is reminiscent of chaos.  

 “I like to paint the whole of life, not the stable forms of objects,” explains Ayaz. The fact remains that his paintings mostly have feminine themes dominated by the colours red, black and white. Does this reflect the view that woman symbolizes all that is beautiful in nature? Or is it a continuation of the cult of the goddess Cybele, which symbolizes the prolificacy and abundance that we come across in all Anatolian civilizations? Perhaps it is a bit of both. Stressing the innocent eroticism of women, the artist appeals to feelings which are present in every brain, and is thus capable of communicating individually with every member of his audience.

Getting involved

Almost Hitchcock-like, Ayaz involves himself personally in each one of his paintings in one way or another. Traces can also be detected of the philosophy of the Ying and the Yang, the golden rule of nature, which encompasses contrasts such as light and dark, good and evil, beautiful and ugly and heaven and hell, in addition to the concrete forms of the female and the male.

Dancing girls sometimes appear in Mustafa Ayaz’s compositions, calling to mind Toulouse-Lautrec. Sometimes there is a surrealism characteristic of Chagal. But none of this detracts from the originality of the style which the artist has created for himself. The power of his paintings depends only on his own hard work and sincerity. More than 400 Ayaz works are to be found in foreign collections, and as many as 4,000 in domestic collections. He has received a total of fifteen awards, and opened forty-seven individual exhibitions. He has also participated in joint exhibitions and biennials in countries as varied as Algeria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Kuwait, Poland, Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States.

(DIPLOMAT  -  January 2004  -  Ankara)