Tamer Derican

“I made a tiny ship of paper
Either 5 kisses fit inside
Or 10 kisses…”
Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu

“When I am not painting, I am like a little child who misses home...”

When I was a child, the world was a comical reality to me, and dreams were the excuse for my games. Trees and roads lived in the streets, laughter and dreams in the houses. We told endless tales without ever getting bored. I did not know where time lived. I used to make paper boats. I would even climb aboard and, in that boat, set off in my dreams for faraway lands. That is what time was like for me as a child.

Time came, time went, and now time neither goes nor comes. Life is nothing but comings and goings anyway. Those who come and those who go. And I, you see, am the one in my land of dreams whose mind comes and goes.

Drawing is a journey I make into my subconscious. With my paper boat, I become part of this voluntary journey… There are things I have lived through on these journeys. I find those places and dig, and dig, until I reach deep within. Then I come out of myself. I draw, I draw, I draw...

When the waters the paper boat floats on begin to ripple with colors, I set out on another deep journey within myself to make a new paper boat.

This is my Sisyphus,* not out of a curse but, in fact, because I know of nothing else to do: I do the same thing over and over again, I draw more and more...

Perhaps it is madness to dare to climb a slope as steep as art just to set my paper boats afloat.

And yet living with colors feels brighter every time. What capsizes I live through, what dreams I dream, with those paper boats of mine!

* The Myth of Sisyphus is an essay by the French writer and thinker Albert Camus, published in the middle of World War II. The book takes its title from Greek mythology. The “real human being” always says “Yes” to a hard and singular journey, and the effort never ends.