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City no.43 Venice
2025 - 2026

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This work began during my visit to Venice in 2025 and developed over the course of a year through countless studies and experiments.

At the time, I was drawing hundreds of houses with ink, focusing on precision and control. Venice unexpectedly shifted that approach. While working on the studies for this piece, I started combining acrylic paint, graphite, and ink, allowing accidents and unfinished forms to become part of the image. A misplaced mark could turn into a new building; an unexpected stain could suggest an entirely different direction. For the first time, drawing became less about perfection and more about possibility.







                           

In many ways, the process began to resemble the formation of cities themselves.

Cities are not built as perfect compositions. They grow through layers, encounters, improvisations, and traces left behind over time.



   

Looking back, City no.43 became more than a city drawing. It marked a turning point in my practice—the moment I stopped trying to control every line and started allowing the work to discover itself.

Throughout the work, fragments from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, typed on my grandfather's typewriter, were incorporated into the surface. Later, stitching entered the process as both a structural and visual element. The threads used in the work came from my grandmother's sewing box, bringing another layer of memory into the piece.

All images © Selcen Karatay