Interview
Alper Özdil
Alper is a 40-year-old versatile, multidisciplinary, self-taught artist from Turkey. He’s also an experimental musician, app and game developer, podcaster, and has many other professional level interests.
He has a 7-year-old daughter, also a multidisciplinary artist, who dances and creates music. She creates high-resolution hand drawn digital paintings. Unlike her dad, she creates her art pieces without any references, solely from her imagination. Both dad and daughter create digital art and music all the time.
Alper has also been involved in several Tabletop Role-playing game projects, as an art director and also responsible for illustrations, under the project name Carovea Victor. He has also professionally illustrated more than 20 books and is still working on more.
What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?
“Since the age of 2 or 3, I’ve always been super interested in creating and designing things. But despite my great love for creating, my parents were concerned about my future career, thinking that art should always be kept as a hobby.
When I was around 7 years old, I was accepted to a music conservatory on scholarship. However, strict rules and repeating learning processes is not really what I was interested in, so I chose to abandon my official music education and started to self educate myself at home. Also during middle school, my art teacher recognized my artistic talent and decided to educate me. During those 6 years, I experienced almost all mediums: charcoal drawing, watercolors, oils, leather and wood carving, sculpting, and so much more. I also studied the history of art, learning different artists and techniques. She put my art in different exhibitions and galleries when I was between 12 and 15 years old, and I even received several awards during that time.
Although art and music were my constant hobbies for 40 years, my professional art journey officially started when I was 38 years old. During the COVID period, I was forced to leave my 16 years of being in a successful international IT Management career and suddenly became jobless. At first it looked like the worst thing that had ever happened in my life. However, something great unfolded, which I believe was some kind of sign from God. I took hold of my fears and decided to continue my life journey with art on a professional level.
Actually, this dramatic decision was no surprise. I had been building my illustration services business during the last few years of my previous career. It didn’t take long for my professional art career to grow, and I became a professional children’s book illustrator and concept fantasy artist. Lately, I’ve gone into NFTs, where I feel I most belong as an artist, freely creating innovative art pieces and collections, combining my lifetime skills. I have created and published many unique, innovative and combined NFT collections and single art pieces. All my art is digitally hand-drawn and 4K resolution. I completely switched my art to digital because I have limited time and what I need in art is speed. This allows me experiment more and experience fast.”
What inspires you?
“This is a question I get quite a lot, because representing my art is not based on direct storytelling and expressing my emotions. Of course, I tell stories through my art, but emotions and storytelling are not my focal points when it comes to presenting myself and my art. I am always fully focused on the creation process itself, which may seem like a disadvantage for marketing purposes.
I strongly believe that my inspiration comes from being fearless against the unknown, loving to step myself into the void and discover along the way. Going with the flow. This is not only limited to art. It’s also how I perceive life—a playground to experiment, learn and share experiences. So my main inspiration is experimenting. I am driven by a huge curiosity in my life, encompassing art, music and everything else.”
What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?
“Although my initial intentions are never to send any messages to the viewers, my debater and visionary personality type, (ENTP), unconsciously does that on my behalf. Most of my work has a backdrop of ideas and messages that are kind of sarcastic, ironic, negative and chaotic, but always realistic. My academic background in engineering and philosophy actually supports and shapes the messages that unintentionally underlie my art. Analytical thinking comes from engineering, and shaping ideas systematically comes from philosophy. They come together and reflect technical and philosophical foresight and ideas about society and humanity in the future, done in a sarcastic way.
As such, the main theme in my art and music is sci-fi. My music does not have lyrics, it tells stories only through melodies. And the underlying messages are not intentional, but they are always there and clearly visible, mostly in the form of sarcasm, irony or humor around conceptual ideas.”
“For me, the creation process is never limited to art and music, although art and music are the main tools I use to express myself and my intellectual side. Even my lifestyle is all about combining different experiences, knowledge and skills on different topics.”
How would you describe your work?
“I describe my work as innovative and out-of-the-box; a combination of many different skills, experience and expertise. It’s like ‘everything is in everything’. Not systematic or planned, but more like an explosion of spontaneous ideas, totally experimental. It is the exact reflection of my personality, driven by a huge curiosity and extroverted intuition.”
Which artists influence you most?
“Da Vinci. When I was a kid, I read a lot about Da Vinci and was so impressed and inspired by him. I made him my hero because I was a child who constantly wanted to research, learn and experiment with different ideas to create innovation. In order to do that, I had to be very observant and spend significant time learning deeply. I was labelled antisocial, introverted and weird by society and even my own parents, though I was not. That made me question myself for a long time as a child. But after discovering that there are historical figures with the same personality type, perception and lifestyle, I found my inspiration to stand against the pressure of society. I focused on being what I am, ignoring all the negative toxicity.
My MBTI personality type and the order of my cognitive functions are the exact same as Da Vinci’s and many others. Having the same personality traits with him forces all of us similar people to combine different knowledge, to find innovative solutions to existing and non-existing problems, and for me specifically to experiment art in every medium and format, adapting it to our time.
Saying this might sound pretentious, but I consider myself a modern day, living clone of Da Vinci because I shaped my lifestyle on his lifestyle.”
What is your creative process like?
“My favorite art pieces mostly come out of nowhere because I’m not afraid to step into the unknown. I never visualize the image of what I’m creating. I start creating and the rest happens by itself. Ideas take clearer shape and even change form during the creation. Adding different skills on an idea makes my art eclectic. I don't even know what comes next until a project is completely done. If I’m not happy with the result, I immediately throw that piece into the trash so that no doubts can exist about that art piece in my mind. Then I simply start all over again.
My creative process can also be considered a learning process. I learn and improve during the creation process. That is the charm of experimenting. I always share my art pieces before they are even completed, to get any kind of criticism and comment. I do this to encourage myself against negativity, and to get motivated to create better. The feedback of people listening neutrally and observing my art objectively helps me improve my technique.”
What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?
“Artists should not focus on the roles. The role should shape itself and should only be observed by other people. An artist also should not become self-involved or egotistical, seeing themselves as a master and trying to reflect this to their community, like some kind of gatekeeper. I see this a lot in art communities. Not everyone can handle power or success and keep being who they are. For this reason, I never view art as a tool for profit or competition. I create art to learn, to experiment, to get inspired and to inspire.
We are in a transitional period in the evolution of art. Technology and social media practices are getting involved in art more and more each day, shaping the future of art. Also, the new generation’s perception plays a huge role in this. I observe in the new generation that they don’t like criticism in any form. They simply don’t care about other thoughts. This is something I partially support in terms of freedom, because art should be the exact reflection of a totally free mind. Art should not be attached to anything specific, like techniques and styles used. The most important thing is creating the idea.
This will be the next evolution in art. With the help of new digital possibilities like NFTs, even kids like my 7-year-old daughter will be free to create and sell art, ignoring everything else but only focusing on the creation process itself, and still be able to succeed. However, this freedom might probably create a lack of learning and improvement, and thus expressing and telling the story will become more important than the quality of the art piece.”
Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?
“Being a multi-disciplinary artist, some of my scaled models, dioramas and character sculptures have won awards and been showcased in various national and international plastic scaled modelling exhibitions in the past years.
I also have a digital project that I describe as an ‘Auditorial 3D Visual Experience’ titled FRACTANUANCE©. Fractanuance is a unique digital NFT collection, all stages created individually by me. It is a combination of my 4K resolution 100% hand-drawn abstract digital illustrations, my original experimental music compositions in different genres, coding skills, engineering experience and 3D animation all together. And maybe a little bit of philosophy for finding the title. It can be considered my lifetime art project, since I combined my lifetime skills, experience and expertise in it.
Basically, it is an art, music, science & technology combined, both organic & code generative, digital 3D visual experience NFT collection, where there are initially 22 unique musical 3D experience items with completely different style, look & music. It is listed on OpenSea right now for a very affordable price for each piece. And I give the “4K Original Hand Drawn Abstract Illustrations” to the collectors of any pieces. This is its official link.
Apart from this collection, I have so many different 1/1 digital hand-drawn and animated art pieces and collection. REN-A.I.-SSANCE is one them, where I combined renaissance paintings and cyborgs, adding my original darkwave electronic sci-fi music compositions into each piece.
I encourage art collectors/digital collectors to visit my website and LinkTree profile to see my work in full.”
