Painter Halime Türkyılmaz: I Develop a Unique Painting Engineering in My Works!

Halime Türkyılmaz is an “exploratory” painter. The “natural” technique she developed with unpainted mineral stones was original and attracted worldwide attention, making her a household name. Not only sand paintings, but also the impressionist, expressionist technique she used in her paintings, she created a “perfect” ergonomics by putting nature into a “natural naive”. Her works, which also yielded very good results on the textured surfaces she brought from her sand paintings, made Türkyılmaz a rising value in Turkish painting in terms of plastic values.

Halime Türkyılmaz: “I am after a technical painting. I work with the smallest microns of stones. These are stones that have become minerals, that is, close to dust, with their own colors. There are only colors that exist in nature in my color spectrum, and in my painting, I use sands of different tones for each value and add them to the ground with glue spray as a dimension. This is an engineering study and I aim to be an engineering artist in my future works.”

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-Sand painting art, made of natural granulated stones, applied by pouring without using paint and fixed… We want to talk about sand paintings. That’s how you started your career. An original and authentic form of painting. Can you tell us a little about its technique?

Sand painting is an innovation. Most importantly, this technique started with me and continues with me. I started in my sophomore year of university. I work with the smallest microns of stones. This painting is formed by the distribution of stones that have become minerals, that is, stones with their own colors close to dust, on the surface. Sand painting art, made of natural granulated stones, applied by pouring without using paint and fixed. They are completely unpainted mineral stones, extracted from quarries in many cities of our country (Tekirdağ and Eskişehir, which I have discovered so far), used for interior and exterior decoration of buildings, between 0-0.7 microns. I go directly to the quarries and buy them in 25-kilo bags. I use the parts that I can sift and use in the sizes I want. The color scale consists only of colors that exist in nature. Black, white, coffee and green tones.

-We should talk a little more about sand painting, such an original painting. How do surfaces, textures, colors come about?

I usually use the parts with a lot of dust for color toning. Then I apply transparent glue to the ground on canvas, hardboard, wood, ceramic... First, I wait for it to dry. Then, I draw the picture, do it with a spatula or my fingers, and after I finish it, I dilute the transparent glue and spray it on top. In this way, we fix it from both the bottom and the top, and the painting remains intact on the ground. After drawing the picture I will make, I apply a single layer of primer with transparent glue (yacht glue). After completing the picture, I dilute the same glue again and spray it on top and fix it. In this way, the painting is fixed from the bottom and the top. In this way, the painting looks textured and nostalgic.

-Anatolia? Endless countryside? Women? People? Nature landscapes... An authentic and lonely "synchronic" nature. Halime Türkyılmaz takes her audience on a journey to the four corners of Turkey. How did all these elements inspire your art? And what is the place of this perspective in Halime Türkyılmaz’s painting and spirituality?

I grew up surrounded by nature since my childhood. We always had a house with a garden. Olive trees in Ayvalık, cherry trees in İzmir. And I would always climb up on those trees and play games for myself there. When we returned to our hometown years later, the endless steppe of Kırşehir left a deep place in my mind. Sunflower fields, wheat fields and a single tree in the middle. Green squares in spring, bright yellow squares in harvest season. Breezes from every city we moved to from the Aegean to central Anatolia join my canvas. Nature is what we belong to. Humans are mostly made of nature and I saw nature as a way to construct my own painting.

-A Painter’s “technical portrait!” Hard brush strokes… Soft brush strokes… Halime Türkyılmaz makes such simple, elegant and original drawings? You act almost like a landscape painter. As its producer and direct interpreter; How do you interpret and define your own art practice both in terms of content and technique?

Although light, color and perspective exist in nature, they are reflected in the painting with my reality. I have a calm, naive, patient and soft-hearted personality. However, sometimes I have very sharp boundaries and sometimes I surprise people with my courage. This is inevitably reflected in the paintings. In fact, I am after a poetic style where I combine Anatolian motifs with natural motifs. I attach importance to the decorative forms of color. My aim is to be one of the painters who prepare the birth of a color spectrum, a depth of light that is unique to us. I want to be evaluated as the continuation of our “national”, in other words, “regional” origin painting from different perspectives, like Ömer Uluç and Oya Katoğlu. I wish to talk about a “Halime Türkyılmaz” line that evaluates color surface sensitivity in a contemporary direction with the inspirations it receives from traditional Turkish painting. Over time, by transforming the line into embroidery, color and stain, the