"Red Lips" Painting

Dilek Öztürk Akçakaya is a Turkish painter living and working in İzmir. She makes oil paintings centred on the human face and figure. Working mostly with a palette knife, she builds thick, sculptural surfaces in which faces dissolve into fields of texture and a single vivid colour (a red band, a yellow stroke, a crown of roses) carries the emotion of the work.

Her subjects are often women seen in moments of stillness: eyes closed, faces half-hidden by hair, a hat or a ribbon of paint. Alongside portraits and figures she paints abstract compositions and occasional animal studies, always with the same attention to the physical presence of paint.

"I paint faces because they hold more than they show. With the palette knife I can add and scrape away, so each portrait is built the way a memory is: in layers, some clear, some lost. I keep most of the canvas quiet, in grey, black and cream, and let one colour speak. I want the viewer to feel the weight of the paint and the silence around the figure, and to finish the story themselves."

Every work is an original, one-of-a-kind oil painting, signed by the artist and shipped with a certificate of authenticity.