Füsun’s bird paintings

Füsun’s bird paintings are a series of carefully observed pictures made in her family’s home in Çukurcuma, where Kemal Basmacı watches them take shape across years of suppers and conversation. Their birds and familiar Istanbul settings offer him a subject through which he can praise Füsun, imagine a shared future, and hold fast to the quiet domestic world that he fears will not last.

Subjects and Making

Füsun paints birds from photographs Feridun has taken around Istanbul. The pictures place familiar birds on the balustrades, windowsills, chimneys, and other features of the city’s houses. When Kemal and Feridun examine a pigeon she is working on, she explains that the difficult part is making the feathers on its head shine. Her account makes the paintings’ labor visible: these are not casual decorations appearing all at once, but works whose individual details demand patience.

The work develops by small increments. A pigeon is followed by a dove, which Füsun says has been finished for a long time; she has since begun a swallow. Later, when Kemal asks about a stork, she says she has not touched it since his last visit. The sequence records both progress and interruption. Each new bird gives the family another picture to discuss, but the stork’s stalled state also shows that the act of painting does not simply advance toward a completed artistic career.

The paintings are made within a limited artistic culture. Kemal recalls that he and Füsun knew little about painting, and that, during their earlier years, Istanbul offered few opportunities to see paintings in museums or browse art books and catalogues. They had once enlarged black-and-white photographs of birds and other subjects and colored them in. That background helps explain the directness of Füsun’s approach: the pictures grow from accessible images and close looking rather than from a developed art-world education.

At the Keskin Dinner Table

Kemal’s attention to the paintings belongs to the repeated rhythm of his visits, not to an isolated studio encounter. From October 23, 1976, through August 26, 1984, he visits the Keskin home for supper 1,593 times over seven years and ten months. He usually arrives around seven and, before the curfew imposed after the 1980 coup, often remains until around midnight. In that long domestic routine, asking how Füsun’s painting is going becomes one of the ways he renews contact with her.

The conversations take place amid the family’s ordinary evening life. Kemal, Füsun, and Feridun stand together to look at a pigeon painting and discuss it at length. Feridun says that Füsun should have an exhibition, while adding that she is too shy. Füsun, by contrast, presents her work without grand claims: “I’m doing these to help pass the time,” she says. The difference between Feridun’s encouragement and Füsun’s modest account leaves the paintings suspended between possible vocation and pastime.

The room around the pictures matters as much to Kemal as the pictures themselves. He remembers the brick-red Uşak carpet, scraps of cloth, buttons, old newspapers, Tarık’s reading glasses, ashtrays, and Aunt Nesibe’s knitting as elements of one encompassing domestic scene. Watching Füsun slowly paint birds gives this familiar room a sense of continuity and security. The paintings do not merely represent birds; in Kemal’s experience, their gradual progress becomes part of the home’s recurring pattern, alongside supper, television, and the family’s conversations.

Artistic Hope and the Imagined Journey

Kemal’s interest in the paintings carries a larger wish. He asks Füsun to go with him to Paris one day to visit museums and see paintings. He remembers having shared a childhood dream of seeing the art there, and Füsun answers that she would like to go. Later, while looking at her work, he imagines that one day people in Paris should see it too. These remarks turn the bird pictures into a meeting point between their modest present and a desired future beyond the household.

The hope is both intimate and precarious. Kemal’s invitation is bold because their closeness is constrained, and because the family setting gives their exchanges an audience as well as a refuge. Yet Füsun receives this particular suggestion naturally. Looking at the paintings lets them speak about art and travel without directly naming all that remains unspoken between them. The shared prospect of Paris briefly gives their relationship a direction, though the evidence does not show them making the journey or bringing the paintings there.

The Pictures and the Stalled Life

As the years pass, the bird paintings reflect the limits of Füsun’s circumstances. Her hoped-for rise to stardom has not happened, and Kemal recognizes that the pair have not moved closer to a resolution. In one later exchange, Füsun says that the dove has long been complete and that she has started a swallow. The modest announcement still gives Kemal something to admire, but it also belongs to a period when their repeated meetings have become an impasse rather than a passage toward a new life.

When he asks about the stork during spring evenings, Füsun sometimes says she is not in the mood to paint. Kemal hears more than a decision about one picture: he senses that her words speak to the dead end of her life as a whole. He also perceives Tarık’s sadness and protective concern for his daughter. This scene marks a change in what the paintings can offer him. They had once provided a reassuring subject for praise and imagined plans; now an untouched canvas helps him recognize the pain and frustration surrounding Füsun’s stalled ambitions. He decides to stop going to watch the filming of Broken Lives, while the household’s distress settles back into silence, television, raki, and cigarettes.

Memory and Material Presence

The paintings are bound to Kemal’s collecting, but not because the account identifies the paintings themselves as objects he takes away. Rather, the work draws his attention to the surrounding things: Füsun’s neatly arranged paints, brushes, bottles, and stained cloths, beside Aunt Nesibe’s sewing materials. During the darkest months of 1979, Kemal pockets a colored porcelain thimble and an orange pastel pencil that Füsun had recently handled. He treats such small possessions as more than souvenirs, believing that they preserve the presence of the moments in which he saw her.

This attachment extends the paintings’ importance beyond their images. Their slow making gives Kemal a reason to look closely and return to the same room; the tools and materials make that attention tangible after he has gone. The bird pictures thus join the wider pattern through which he tries to keep domestic time from disappearing. Their importance lies not in a documented public reputation or completed artistic career, but in the patient scenes they organize: a bird examined at supper, a future proposed in a whisper, and an unfinished picture that reveals how little either lover can change.