As I have just discovered, my friend Hikmet Karabulut (his last name, translated, means: the dark cloud) is much more famous than me, and these are good news. In fact it is an eternity since I’ve had news of him, and the last time I just saw his wife and children in Turkey (2001). We met as accidentally as I’ve always met people, while trying to forget my lonelyness during my first year in Paris. I used to go up to Montmartre and I met someone he new, whose name I forgot, a kurd painter who always painted red pictures and who Hikmet didn’t apparently think good company for me so that he rescued me and put me under his personal protection. We would spend hours from then on talking about everything and nothing and he taught me the elemantary rudiments of painting. I liked his early painting very much, where he combined very obscure blocks with arising lights and transparents figures (style I’ve only seen in Spanish Naranjo and here only in his portrait of Farah Dibah of Iran), he wouldn’t sell very much so that he became apparently more commercial, though always leaving the indication of something else in allusions made through waving colours. He was always telling stories, Turkish stories like Ali Baba or related, which of course I undestood as I wanted as I didn’t speak French when I first met him and his French was very broken. Intuitive levels of communication … His wife did make good paintings, too, but stopped painting after the birth of first born Eren.
This very personal liking was though never accompanied by a more general interest in painting, I couldn’t understand in museums. Asked by my Esthetics teacher Anne Moeglin Delcroix why I wouldn’t go to the French museums, I said, to her greatest horror, that I’d prefer to have a coffee somewhere. In fact, I had been, pushed by some kind of higher moral obligation, to the Louvre, the Pompidou and to the Prado in Spain, but I remember having crossed the rooms at greatest speed, like someone who goes to the church and waits for the moment the liturgy has finished from the very moment he has stepped in.
It’s true there were some pictures that had attracted my attention: some of Klimt, some of Chagall

some of Marc

.

I adored some Greco and some Goya (on bulls) and a few Velazquez

Picasso’s blue and pink period

  

seemed to show some interest, as well as some Dali. I was enchanted with crazy Lempicka (spent half an hour to find her name through relative Lolita Lempicka, who is easier to find as she is involved in parfumes and fashion),

whose pictures I specially went to see in Beaubourg and which I discovered to my greatest surprise in a Martini publicity (the one with the woman who does scratch another’s back), but I couldn’t really understand the meaning of all these gathered colours and just judged on very suvjective impressions: it was agreable to the eye and to my understanding.
It was after Rublev

 and the encounter with orthodox icon painting that I started to form myself a more objective opinion, using though certainly not esthetical criteria, I couldn’t have, but more social factors: the impact of image on a given eye in a determined social period. I have though to admit that my knowledge on the matter is quite restricted and even if I used some paintings in order to give image to some of my highly metaphysical ideas, I can’t really say that my general culture on the matter is large enough. (I should have followed my teachers advice.)

Posted by Sonja Kasten in Sonja Kasten.wordpress.com Wednesday, November 1st 2006. http://sonjakasten1.wordpress.com Sonja_Kasten.wordpress.com