Sema Gurun
Sema Gurun likes to paint on canvases smaller than most Abstract Expressionists. She believes that creativity comes from the ability to free associate and finds her painterly expression between pre-conscious abstraction and expressionism.
She was born in Turkey and raised under the influence of ancient civilizations and art. She would see layers of civilization such as cave and aboriginal art, the artifacts of archeological digs, Greco-Roman relief and sculpture and the later French/German expressionists - as a vessel for her psyche. Her palette is formed by the color that is expressive to the day’s mood and her dream life. Although various modern and classical artists have influenced her work and individual sense of color, she feels that the artist’s canvas is always under the nexus of influence by the collective unconscious, the impact of the day’s events, the political zeitgeist of the day - - and the effect of the company the artist keeps.
Immersed in her fine arts studies at the National Academy and the Art Students League, she found herself surrounded by a circle of influential artists, including Henry Finkelstein, Barbara Adrian, Kikuo Saito, Nicki Ohrbach, William Scharf, Frank O'Cain and Larry Poons. She is aware of the influences of each artist on her work even as she painted in the corner of the studio, in her own imagination.
Gurun is also a psychoanalyst and naturalist. She loves the animal world and has lived in Africa and has traveled widely around Africa and the globe. Her work is scattered around the globe in private collections in New York, Maine, Connecticut, Toronto , Istanbul, and Geneva. A 2021 presentation of Sema’s work to Artists Talk on Art can be viewed here.
