Arles Cafe Terrace Painting

I like blue. That draws a lot of blue sky and sea. In blue dreams, hopes, future, determination, enthusiasm and acclaim. Through my paintings I hope you think for a moment to dream. Memory gradually fades, gets erased, and gets fragmented as time passes. Scents that had felt nothing special at first and landscapes that slid by can stay in memory. However, after time passes, memory splits a bit by bit and goes into an attic called forgetfulness and gets piled up. And it gets all mixed up. The same goes for the memories from trips. Beautiful landscapes, tasty foods, or even great music slowly go inside darkness and fade. They can be found only at the moment we are confronted with some elements of memories that we can connect or when we intentionally try to pass through the memory tunnel inside our brain since we miss the previous trip. Traveling is a little fantasy in life. We can live an unrealistic life that we have dreamed of when we stop for a while doing things that we do for our daily life. We can get up late, not hurry, eat delicious foods, or drink coffee at an open-air café, watching people. Or, we can choose not to do anything. The time of our everyday life stops while we travel. We can even live a life as if we are not ourselves but some others. However, traveling always has an end. Perhaps, the reason traveling is a beautiful fantasy is because there is an end. How about love, then? Doesn’t it resemble traveling to a degree? We live, always dreaming of a love that is breathtakingly beautiful just like we live, dreaming of a trip. Like we live others’ lives during taking trips, we change as if we are not ourselves when we fall in love, become so generous and passionate to our sweethearts, and hope for our future. However, even a fantasy as a heartfelt love comes to an end as time goes. This is painful and beautiful as well since we always have limited time. Finished trips and fantasies about love turn into longing and get stored. We remember the summer night we spent in the Seine, Paris, and miss our painful first loves we had in our early twenties. I work on this subject of “memory” because I want to stop the moments for a while before the tunnel of my memories all shut down. But I can only remember some impressive parts and most parts are getting filled with margins; but there is someone that I miss, and there is love, longing, loneliness, happiness, and sorrow in the margins.