We are at the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts (IMOGA). This time we met with my esteemed teacher Professor SĂŒleyman Saim Tekcan for an interview.

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Photos by Serkan Eldeleklioğlu

We are at the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts (IMOGA). This time we met with my esteemed teacher Professor SĂŒleyman Saim Tekcan for an interview. Our paths crossed years ago when I was not even an art student yet. More precisely, when my dear professor was the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at IĆŸÄ±k University, he had visited my first solo exhibition at Ayazağa IĆŸÄ±k High School, which was located right next to his building, and invited me to his chair to meet him. As someone who had the chance to work together in the same atelier environment, I would like to express once again that I am very happy to know him so closely from the dozens of conversations we had at the Imoga Museum, which was one of my indispensable stops when I came to Istanbul during my art education in London. SĂŒleyman Saim Tekcan is a versatile artist, a mentor who has devoted himself to both his art and art education, who is successful in all branches of art such as painting, sculpture, printmaking, cinema. Again with all his sincerity, he welcomes me in his studio in the museum surrounded by his works and we start the interview


You were born in Trabzon in 1940, and between 1958 and 1961 you studied at the Painting Department of Ankara Gazi Education Institute under teachers such as Refik Epikman, Veysel ErĂŒstĂŒn and ƞinasi Barutçu. So how did you meet the art of printing, which has an important place for you?

I worked in a printing house in Trabzon at a young age. This printing house was publishing the newspaper Sesi of Trabzon. I worked as a typesetter. The typesetter arranges the letters as words and places them on the caliper. These are shaped into a page and the pages are printed as a newspaper. I did all these works in my childhood. Then, of course, I was taking the newspaper under my arm and distributing it to subscribers in Trabzon. This is how I met with printing. Of course, it was not something I thought I would be a print artist in the future. Gazi Terbiye was a very important school. It was an education that started in a very important and special building founded by AtatĂŒrk and built by Architect Kemaleddin. There were many departments; literature, science, pedagogy, German, English, French, painting, music, etc. Gazi Terbiye was an institution that would raise TĂŒrkiye to its feet in terms of education. Gazi Terbiye, as it was then called, later became Gazi Education, and now Gazi University. Very recently, when I went to open the big exhibition at the National Library in Ankara, they invited me and gave me the biggest award of Gazi Terbiye. I felt that I stood in a very important place among the graduates of that school. ƞinasi Barutçu was our Graphics teacher. There we learned how to make gravure, lithography and we practiced other printing techniques. In other words, my meeting with the printing arts, which we call artistic printing, started at Gazi Terbiye.