Rezzan ERGUVAN-ONAL

We’re all travelers in this world… Now we’re here, and then we will be gone.
I’m a painter and a medical doctor (a pathologist) in Turkey. My grandparents immigrated from Greece (Thessaloniki) and Macedonia (Skopje) to Anatolia in the Ottoman period. I travel with my husband and son all around the world on my holidays, I take photographs in those different countries, and then paint them. So they are all original paintings. They are the real moments in life. I have a very large photo archive. There are so many wonderful scenes I captured. And I also saw wonderful scenes that I tried to tu...

We’re all travelers in this world… Now we’re here, and then we will be gone.
I’m a painter and a medical doctor (a pathologist) in Turkey. My grandparents immigrated from Greece (Thessaloniki) and Macedonia (Skopje) to Anatolia in the Ottoman period. I travel with my husband and son all around the world on my holidays, I take photographs in those different countries, and then paint them. So they are all original paintings. They are the real moments in life. I have a very large photo archive. There are so many wonderful scenes I captured. And I also saw wonderful scenes that I tried to turn on my camera, but couldn’t capture (they are all in my mind). I want to paint them in the future. Well, in these times the images pass by me so fast, just in seconds… And I feel strange things: I say to myself “Yes, this moment is also gone. I could have captured it, but I couldn’t…” Just like the life itself!
Who knows, perhaps someday we encounter somewhere and I can paint you.
Painting is a passion for me. I wake up at four o’clock in the mornings, and begin to paint. At seven o’clock I prepare the breakfast of my son, and then send him to school and later go to my work in the state hospital. In this way I can paint everyday in peace, in silence when everybody is sleeping. But surely I wish I could paint all day long. I’d like to retire as soon as I can, and devote myself to painting. Because I see dead people, and people who are dying… Well, this is not a phrase from “The Sixth Sense” film, I really do… I sign their reports (autopsy and cancer reports), and I’m tired of that… I want to sign the living part of the world, not the dying one any more.
Now I’m 43 years old and I want to see the people who feel happy and beautiful things when looking at my paintings.