User:Berocean

Berrin Yavuzer – Artist Statement

I am working with the uncontrolled expression and combination of internal imagery, abstractions freighted with feeling. I tend to paint medium to large canvases in primary acrylics.

It is a real challenge for me to use words about my work. Cultural influences of the eastern Mediterranean, clash of east and west, symbolic glyphs, tales of the Aegean diaspora, images of ancient myth, and Muslim constraint recur in my work – on the surface and just beneath it.

My feeling varies in reflection of inner struggles, typified by forceful expressions of color. There is the constant battle to bridge external reality and the unconscious. Sometimes there is an internal leap beyond the threshold to dream and fantasy, an unexplainable odyssey into childhood fear and fulfillment.

The woman at the canvas – child, daughter, woman, wife, mother, human, artist – reaches into darkness and finds colorful nightmare visions in her. The woman in me – extravert, unusual, pessimist, with a black and white window on life – needs to fight to bring to light these visions as the past and the darkness reach out for me. Yet my conscious aesthetic remains excitement and sensitivity.

I was born and raised in Turkey. I received my BA degree in film and television production from Marmara University in Istanbul where I worked as a film editor and painter for many years. I came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001. My goal is to become more widely known in the American art world.

Berrin Yavuzer