Yüksek Oyma Basmalarım (Söyleşi)

INTERVIEW WITH ASLIER

MY ENGRAVING

For high engraving, molds are obtained by engraving wood or linoleum and similar floor covering layers.

Planks made from wood trunks longitudinally or in cross-section are used with planed, sanded boards, especially in recent years, using boards made by gluing thin layers of wood.

I made my first high engraving black and white painting in 1945, while in the second grade of Balıkesir Necatibey Teacher School. 24x30cm with black ink and brush, influenced by the light-dark appearance of my friends who play chess in front of a window.

I made a picture of your height.

Our teacher Mahir Gürsel liked this picture very much. He told me that if I keep working like this, I can become a graphic artist.

In those years, teachers from the Gazi Education Institute, especially in the Teacher Schools and Village Institutes, were forming shaping conflicts, which we call basic design today.

There were two courses in the programs of these schools under the name of painting and modeling. In the modeling lesson, engraving , cardboard cutting, gluing, shaping with clay and plaster techniques were used.

Teachers who are interested and knowledgeable in some schools were working more intensely on original print, painting or sculpture. Therefore, talented students could turn to one of these branches at a young age.

I can say that Mahir Gürsel's appreciation of my black and white work started me to turn to carved-printed paintings.

In 1946-1947 academic year, my higher education started in Gazi Education Institute Painting Department.

Sinasi Barutcu was coming to our graphic lessons. He would do a four-hour lesson with 1,2 and 3 classes a week.

We used to get criticism that shows our sketches that are finished.

Linoleum engraving knives and linoleum plates were given by the department for the original print image. We learned the technical possibilities by looking at the work of previous students.

I loved making black-and-white high engraving-prints and won the praise of Şinasi Barutçu. I can say that these compliments I received in front of advanced class students intensify my work in the direction of original print and painting.

People were drawing my subjects from the environment.

In those years, together with Adnan Turani and Nevzat Akoral, we would draw human pictures in the Ankara Station waiting room, in Ankara's street markets and coffee shops. I spent all my holidays in the environment with such observational studies. I have many notebooks and files filled with drawings from that period.

Depending on the material provided by the department, I produced linoleum carved printed paintings, the largest of which cannot exceed 18x24cm.

The general feature of these original prints that I have done until I get a diploma can be summarized as "Expression in natural attitudes without making form interpretation with the possibilities that can determine the shape of the light shadow".

It can be said that I was impressed by the black and white prints of German expressionists.

After I got my diploma, I was appointed as graphic teacher at the Engraving Department at high school level. This department, which was first in Ankara, was moved to Istanbul Sultan Ahment Art Institute in 1951.

I got the possibilities of stone pressing technique that I started to get acquainted with when I was a student there.

There were stone press hand press, stones and offset equipment in the department.

Until I was sent to Germany for education in October 1953, I experimented with a few high engraving pictures as well as more stone printing techniques.

While I was studying German at the University of Munich, I continued to Munich Graphic Academy as a guest student for a year. Indeed, the curriculum at this academy was geared towards engineering.

However, professor of artistic and functional design with typographic elements. Joseph Kaeufer's ancestor caught my attention.

The works I have done and seen in this workshop, and the natural abstract interpretations focused on pure abstract and abstraction that I have encountered in museums and exhibitions have led me to new experiments in these directions.

Now, I turned to the comments that emphasize the possibilities of forming my people, not their anatomical structures.

Although I gradually get away from the details reflecting the emotional expression of the subject, with the pressure of my habit of telling something, my comments have shifted to decorative motifs with aesthetic anxiety rather than simple shape.

I looked for simpler forms to get rid of this deviation.

The ability of wood engraving technique to form shape rather than detail made it easier for my work to get rid of this predicament. I started to throw away the clothes that brought the detail drawing of my people together.

On the one hand, while the figures turned into plain shapes, I met my need for expression by symbolizing them.

In 1957, in Stuttgart. Together with Walte Staehle, Necati Cumalı's "Outpost"

We realized his long poem which can be called epic as a hand-printed book.

I translated the epic, which consists of ten parts, into German. Prof. Staehle undertakes typographic design, hand typesetting and raid.

I have also prepared twelve print image molds for the book with high engraving technique.

Professor Staehle's professor for the text Molds made by Ernst Engel by hand, never before we used unused lead letters.

We also had the skin made by the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Arts skin lecturers.

Many numbered of engraving was produced on the hand press.

There are collectors of hand engraving books in Germany. Their club immediately bought sixty-five of the seventy-five books that Prof. Staehle had on their behalf. They also bought museum museums and collections. When I returned to the country, I distributed most of the books that I had to my share, especially Necati Cumalı, to the press and those who showed interest.

In Turkey, you should have such a tradition of collecting books resulting from manual production manuscripts.

Since it was not available, only Yaşar Nabi Nayır, the founder of Varlik Magazine, and Abdi İpekçi which is the director of the Milliyet newspaper, showed interest in our book. And they published on the book.

The first original prints that I opened at the Gallery Senatore in Stuttgart on July 1, 1957 were in majority. A wall calendar for 1959 was printed by Karlsruhe CF Müller publishing house with pictures purchased from this exhibition.

Our people in this calendar, which was printed ten thousand times under the name of "Turkische Graphic", have not been pictured with clothes yet.

My print pictures in the calendar and hand-printed book are the first examples of my formal attempts to simplify and symbolize. Local effects are very evident. That is why my exhibition, calendar and pictures in the book attract attention in Germany.

Paintings about people from a country where centuries of human painting have been forbidden.

Moreover, these people show a different expression than the western painting.

It was an interesting innovation for Germany in those years. In order to minimize the apparent local feature in my paintings, I first looked for lean shapes, reducing the clothes, until the figures were all naked. In October 1958, I returned to the country and started teaching as a newly opened School of Applied Fine Arts. I was tasked to set up an original print workshop.

The easiest technique we used was the high engraving technique. No special press was required.

At that time, my high engraving printing works intensified. I entered the linguistic enrichment research, which I started by reducing the clothes, by adding one or two colors next to the black and white shapes.

The simple and symbolic narration that I caught in the print pictures I made in the 1960s by engraving wood and linol molds gave a monumental effect to my figures and their fiction.

My friend, who is also a German painter himself, suggested that I make these in wall dimensions by pointing to this monumentality. In this effect I made in 1969, 50x64cm. 2.5x.5m on the wall of my house on Marmara Island.

We transferred it in size with mosaic technique.

This app proved the monumental (in a way, architectural) effect in the print picture.

At the end of the 1980s, I touched a two-meter-long rug in a colorful wooden print painting. This rug, which was hung on the wall, showed that many of my prints will increase their effects when they grow to wall sizes.

In the 1970s and later, I used more wood as a mold in high engraving. As the figures became simplier as shapes and symbols, the color element increased and the fictions turned to new experiments.

I made experiments that intensified or enrich the symbolic narration in symmetrical fictions seen in Byzantine and Roman mosaics, icons, Turkish carpets and rugs, and staging that I call "standing at the window or door".

This attitude is also seen in my stone prints in the same years.

Due to the technique and material, hundreds of my small print images could be applied to wall painting dimensions. However, no such request was received from the state or individuals.

It can be seen that I use the possibilities of visual elements such as shape and color in all of my high-print images, while at the same time, I have acquired and developed an original expression, and that I have brought a universal level to the regional features with my figures transformed into symbols.

During my student years in Germany, he was able to print my black and white editions in the Varlik Magazine and in some books.

In Turkey, these pictures I posted on my name, and they contribute to the Asset Magazine Bellen loved my black and white printmaking.

I think that my paintings, which I have exhibited in the post-1960 years, have increased interest in this technique.

In particular, the State Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions' n Pentura In addition, by giving place to printmaking began in the 1960's international exhibitions and called that they not be sent abroad on behalf of Turkey.