Collection: Landscapes of Dreaming

Ascendant to the real and the living, Pelin chooses her subjects according to her own vision and her personal sensibility of each landscape, interpreting and recreating contemporary freedom. Chimène Ishaka of Galerie 5 continents says of Pelin’s work, “The major composition of her paintings evoke her love and respect for nature... we feel in harmony with this environment... it challenges the flaws and weaknesses of human beings without judgment... Her work stays zen. The romantic side remains. The color sparkles.” As a dual citizen of Turkey and Canada, she has held solo exhibitions in Europe, Canada and the United States over her 25-year art career. Pelin says of her own work,

Artist’s statement

My approach to painting derives from the consequences and possibilities of colors living side by side. I enjoy submerging in the surprise and play colors offer as they are let loose from their tubes and containers, sometimes in pure splashes, sometimes mixed and worked, to take on new life on the canvas with imaginative flashes of a brush or a finger or a knife. Everything depends on this relationship of colors; it is the primary joy of the visual. Forms, patterns, contours– and later delineations– are conjured from their essential vivid appearance and radiation.

A harmony, or skilful balance, then becomes of my utmost concern. Without playing colors against each other wisely, or by ignoring a color's own implicit array of sympathies and antipathies, the impact of colors moving emotionally across, into, and through each other, is diminished. A painter in love with color delights in the freedom of paint like a child, and succeeds through innocence; but, listening to colors, the painter deploys them according to their secret desires, and succeeds through the affectionate and intelligent care of the gardener.

Ultimately, these colors grow to support a larger, grander conversation of forms and patterns. I seek the emergence of bounded worlds that should glow with a simple, musical incandescence. I try to catch a glimpse of ecstatic magic through often benevolent commonplace objects, images, and animals set amid rough-hewn landscapes. This is where a person's heart resonates warmly, unburdened, but open to the dreaming rhythms that escape our more complicated and self-obsessed habits.