serdar ersun

Lives and works in Istanbul. Three materials, with no hierarchy between them: the subject decides which one it wants.

Watercolour is for working on location. A street, a jetty, a café table — usually in one sitting. Because decisions made on wet paper cannot be undone, most of the painting is over before the brush lands; what follows is execution. A work returned to after it has dried is almost always ruined, so it isn't returned to.

Charcoal is for portraits and musicians. The point there isn't likeness: it is the direction of the creases around an eye, the weight of a jaw, where a soloist pulls his shoulder as he breathes in. Detail goes to two or three places only; everything else stays as hatching.

Acrylic is for seeing what colours do when they sit next to each other. Flesh tone is never mixed on the palette — an orange and a blue are laid side by side and the eye does the mixing. Unlike watercolour you can work back into it, but everywhere you do stays visible afterwards.

Subjects repeat, deliberately: the same harbour, the same street, the same face. What you see the first time you draw something is not what you see the fifth time.