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Interview with Diane Özdamar

The young and talented artist Diane Özdamar has been attracted to art in all of its forms, cinema, music, painting and sculpting, for as long as she can remember. She took some courses in art school where she learned the traditional techniques and heightened her observation skills. Diane is also a musician and uses music for inspiration. As for digital art, she considers herself as a self-educated artist..

IT’S ART: Most of your paintings depict characters, why do you prefer characters over other subjects?

Diane Özdamar: Well simply because characters talk to me more. I’m not crazy, what I mean by this is that I have a stronger relation with characters. I can easily imagine them in situations and give them roles in imaginary stories that would never happen without them. I like to give them a personality and surround them with a context, I give them life! I can’t do the same with other subjects unfortunately even though I like working on sceneries, landscapes, machines and other subjects.

IA: Where do you find the creatures you paint?

DO: They come straight out of my imagination. When I’m looking for inspiration I just let myself go, free my mind and spirit. Those creatures are the inhabitants of these worlds I create in my head when I’m in this kind of trance. They are perfectly linked to my phobias and obsessions; namely a certain attraction-repulsion to the abysses, aquatic spaces filled with hybrid creatures. These creatures are the reflection of my unconscious and they allow me to escape from a very realistic and logical world toward a baroque and tortured universe.

IA: What do you think of traditional art?

DO: I am passionate about traditional art. I am always amazed by the skills of the classical painters and how they manipulated light especially. It is extraordinary what a human being can do with a piece of coal, mud, a piece of stone, some colors out of a tube… It is mainly because of traditional painting that I started digital painting. I worked on many acrylics, oil paintings, drawings and sculptures before starting digital painting. I notice that I still sometimes have the tendency to work using traditional techniques even when I’m painting on a screen.

IA: How do you think that traditional art complements digital art?

DO: Traditional art taught me how to use light and shade, how to work with colors, etc. And these techniques appear in my digital work. I don’t think I would have been able to figure out those techniques all by myself if I started digital painting before learning traditional painting. I think that traditional painting is very important in developing digital techniques since it allows you to directly see the rendering of the material, colors, etc, which we cannot find in digital art. A digital painting can easily look plain and plastic. On the other hand, digital art offers possibilities that don’t exist in traditional art. I can retouch colors, modify the composition and the form of some elements, and delete things without messing up the whole work. This is where digital art complements traditional art.