TURAN EROL - ANKARA COAL DISTRIBUTION INSTITUTION

Born in Milas in 1927, Turan Erol studied painting at the Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1944 and 1951. Spending many years in Diyarbakır providing art education with the aim of spreading art to the public and reflecting the lives of the public in art production, Turan Erol began teaching in Ankara in 1961 and later became a faculty member. In his paintings, Turan Erol frequently depicted workers’ lives and working environments in a style that bore traces of both the late-Cubist style stemming from his education at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts and the informal art movement he encountered during his stay in Paris. Turan Erol, who has aspects of being a painter, writer and educator, summarizes his approach to art with the following sentences: “I am a painter who looks at the environment he lives in and constantly thinks about what he sees, but I am not someone who is fond of ready-made, accepted beauties either. There is only room in my paintings for what I think...”

Elements such as delicate electricity poles, people, boat skeletons, sailboats, pergolas, domed water cisterns are motifs that he appropriates to convey the Aegean and Mediterranean taste and joy of life to his audience. In most of the artist's landscapes, the sky is the main element that determines the plot and indicates which time period of the day the moment being painted is and determines the emotion of the work. What balances these sky spots are the water and land spots in the foreground. In between the sky and land elements are people, buildings, trees, boats, bicycles and other objects of life activities. The presence of mountain and sea spots, plane trees, olive and cypress trees that complete and lock the compositions is one of the important features of the artist's painting language that also glorifies local sensitivities.