We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Belgin Yucelen a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Belgin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
Success is an internal satisfaction more than external recognition. Being an artist demands a continuous focus, learning, and documenting. The resulting ideas form and reform a thousand times while they collide with each and are revised through a filter of our emotions. Possibilities for materials, colors, structures, and forms are evaluated in the meantime. When finally the ideas mature, comes the incredible lightness of letting go as the artmaking itself starts. Once our preconstructed imagination is pleased, the satisfaction is profound like swimming in the depths of the ocean. The satisfaction from recognition although still pleasing remains on the surface, like surface dwellers who only taste life rather than indulging in all possibilities.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am an artist, I feel it in my bones. I make prints, sculptures, films, installations, paintings to satisfy unrealized dreams. I spend long hours alone, thinking, looking out the window, smiling at the flying geese, listening, remembering, dancing, while seeking beauty, wisdom, sincerity and deception to seduce the mind. At nights I chase the moon. All I create has its own story and an invitation to myself and the realm of my dreams.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
Being an artist is glamorous but at the same time heavy. You have to carry yourself in a certain way to justify this glamourous title with the words you use, the way you smile, and the way you give. You have to return day and night to that state of mind of imagining, to make sense of the endless ideas that keep returning. You have to find the best way of depicting these ideas and you are not to stop searching for more. There are obstacles on that uphill path you take, but once you get there the moon is so close, so captivating it justifies every single failure, despair, and long hours of solitude.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I would like to evoke a form of consciousness and invite discussion and self-exploration by sharing my emotions, dreams, desires, curiosities in a most vulnerable way. In many aspects of my life, including objects I own, words I use, and my art, I aim to assume meaning with less. In my artmaking, I use a soft voice, almost an understatement with silences, and pauses which create spaces of ambiguity where the viewer can escape from the limitations and complexities of a well-defined subject. By presenting a mere hint of the story, I evaluate the possibility of art to provoke seeking for emotions. Through the act of revealing or concealing, similar to a fenced garden which partly obstructs the view, the viewer stays longer to find out what is hidden behind. This also empowers the viewer to imagine and make their own aesthetic choices and personal interpretations.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://belginyucelen.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/belginyucelenartist/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/belgin.yucelen
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/belgin-yucelen-48b85145/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/BelginYucelen
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbUSQbl5ebeD-bv4MvBg8gQ