France, Ardeche / Turkey, Istanbul: Tuna Firat, 17, studend
I’m an exchange student from Turkey, Istanbul who currently lives in Ardeche (South of France). I’m sharing with you my Insights on Corona that I wrote a few weeks ago as well as some paintings I did during the quarantine.
Normally I should be returning to my home country -Turkey- on the 5th of July. Unfortunately, all the exchange student programs has ended with Coronavirus but they said that the borders are closed for a while. …
… Today it’s our 54th (10.05.20) day of quarantine and I am stuck here.
I noticed today, that life has turned to Edward Hopper’s paintings. We are all isolated from the crowded cafes or 24/7 opened all-night diners. And even if we wanted to go in, all the restaurants have closed their doors to the public just like Hopper has placed us in his ‚Nighthawks‚ painting, on the city street with no doors to enter the diner.
Meanwhile, lots of people are trying to return to the countrysides from crowded cities. Everyone is just trying to escape the urban lifestyle for rural passages where there are no complicity or possible encounters.
If not we are trying to make less contact with the outer world.
Now we are all closed in our houses trying to understand the mental and emotional forcefield that can arise between empty walls, sunlight and shadows. Now we understand and feel time differently. We don’t rush anymore or have full routines, every day is nearly the same. But we are lost in our wide and varied inner life. We get to face our complex emotions and inexplicable boredom.
And here we can capture a deeper level of meaning in his paintings. We are understanding our visions on this pandemic or our lifestyle how it’s reflected by social media or how we approach it. As Hopper wrote, his paintings were the outward expression of an inner life and this inner life is a result of our personal vision of the world.
So as we forced away to walk away from our normal lifestyle (Which, by the way, I think he already founded our normal life absurd and obscured but with the pandemics, we can signify or identify our anxieties) with this incomprehensible emptiness, and complete complex thoughts that arise with it, I understood to think and look at things differently.
This lockdown helped me to understand my self, it thought me to love myself and it’s non-sense to overthink the same things over and over again. On top of all this, I had time to draw and expend my skills a little bit.
Unluckily, I can’t draw like Edward Hopper nor does my style look like his but I would like to share with you my drawings that I did during this quarantine.
