The Zafer Style - How a Zafer Painting is Made: Technique and Craft

How a Zafer Painting is Made: Technique and Craft. A painting begins before the brush touches the canvas. It begins with a decision: what is this painting about, and what do I want the viewer to feel when they look at it? These two questions sound simple, but they contain everything. Before a single mark is made, the subject must be chosen with intention, and that intention must be clear enough to survive the entire process of making the work.

Feeding chickens - 2019

I often compare a painting to a film. In cinema, the director's first responsibility is to identify the hero: the central figure or force around whom everything else organises itself. A good director ensures that no secondary character steals the show, that the eye always knows where it belongs. The same principle applies to painting. The main subject must be legible at first glance. I have seen many paintings in which the artist introduced too many competing elements: a mountain, a sunset, dancers around a fire, a sailboat on the horizon, a couple silhouetted against the water, and a flower arrangement in the foreground. The moment too much information enters the frame, the message loses its power, and the viewer loses their way.

When I create a Zafer painting, my intention must be crystal clear. Sometimes I make sketches beforehand, but more often I visualise the entire composition before I touch the canvas. The drawing appears, complete, in my mind, and all I have to do is trace it. That moment of inner clarity, when the painting exists fully formed before it exists in paint, is one of the quiet rewards of this work.

The main subject does not always assert itself through size. Colour can be an equally powerful tool of attention. A small red form in the far corner of a blue canvas can command as much focus as a large tree placed at the centre. Colour is an extraordinary magnet. In a Zafer painting, where colour is used expressively rather than descriptively, this becomes even more true. A single warm accent in a field of cooler tones will pull the eye immediately, regardless of the scale of the element that carries it. Learning to use colour as a compositional force, rather than simply as a way of representing things accurately, was one of the most important shifts in how I paint.

Perspective is the architecture of a painting. It is the structure beneath the surface that tells the viewer where they are standing and how far the world extends in front of them. In classical landscape painting, perspective is used to create the illusion of depth: to make a flat canvas feel like a window onto a three-dimensional world. In the Zafer style, perspective plays the same fundamental role, but with more freedom. It can be realistic, following the rules of geometry and optics, or deliberately distorted, stretched, or compressed to serve the image's emotional logic rather than its literal accuracy.

Making of a painting

Once a painter truly understands perspective, it stops being a technical constraint and becomes a creative instrument. You can use it to draw the viewer into the painting, making them feel as if they could step through the canvas and keep walking. You can slow the eye down or accelerate it. You can create a sense of intimacy or of vast, open distance. In a Zafer painting, where the surface is already dense with graphic information, perspective is what prevents the image from becoming flat. It gives the viewer a journey through the work rather than simply a surface to look at.

The graphic shapes are the heart of the Zafer style. They grew directly from my study of Van Gogh, from asking what would happen if his flowing, energetic brushstrokes were simplified to their absolute geometric essence. The answer turned out to be richer than I had expected. Working with circles, spirals, squares, triangles, lines and dots, I discovered that these elements did not prevent the viewer from understanding what they were looking at. A chicken rendered in dots, stripes or triangles is still unmistakably a chicken. A sky built from giant overlapping circles or broad horizontal bands is still read instantly as a sky. The graphic treatment did not undermine comprehension. In most cases, it enriched it: it made familiar subjects more visually alive, more interesting to spend time with.

Each shape has its own personality and its own weight. Squares and triangles are the most forceful. They are angular and assertive, and they draw the eye strongly. They must be used with care, placed deliberately, because they will always compete for attention. Squares in particular sit uncomfortably with organic, natural forms and tend to work best in architectural contexts: walls, rooftops, window frames, the geometry of built things. Circles and spirals are altogether different in character. They are smooth, continuous, and accommodating. They flow around other elements rather than competing with them, and they carry a warmth that the harder-edged shapes do not. Spirals in particular have an almost hypnotic quality. They suggest movement, energy, and growth. They are among the most expressive tools in the Zafer vocabulary.

The choice of which shape to use in any given area of a painting is never accidental. Sometimes a triangle works where a circle would not, or a spiral brings life to a passage that dots leave inert. This is knowledge that cannot be learned quickly. After more than twenty years of working with these elements, I am still discovering how they behave, how they interact, and how to colour them in ways that bring out their full expressive potential. The Zafer style rewards patience.

Colour in the Zafer style does not work the way it does in classical painting. In a traditional approach, colours are mixed on the palette before being applied. The painter decides in advance which hue they want, produce it by mixing, and then places it on the canvas. In a Zafer painting, the approach is almost the reverse. Colours are placed separately on the surface and left for the viewer's eye to mix them visually. The result is experienced rather than calculated.

The closest analogy is offset printing. In commercial printing, four ink colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and black, are laid down in precise patterns of tiny dots. No green ink exists in the process. Green is produced by placing yellow and cyan dots in close proximity, and the eye reads the combination as green. The mixture happens in perception, not on the plate. The Zafer technique operates on exactly this principle.

In practice: I might paint a plain blue background and then layer hundreds of small yellow triangles across it. Seen from a distance, the eye blends the two colours, and the surface reads as green. The green does not exist on the canvas. It exists in the act of looking. I use this technique in nearly every Zafer painting, and it gives the colour in these works a quality that direct mixing cannot produce: vibrancy and a slight visual shimmer, as though the surface is alive.

The same logic governs the warmth and coolness of surfaces. Adding yellow dots to a green field warms it. Adding blue dots to the same surface cools it. By controlling which colours are layered and in what density, I can shift the emotional temperature of any passage in the painting without changing its dominant hue. The viewer's eye does the mixing. My role is to set the conditions for that to happen.

Yellow triangles on a green background

Blue triangles on the same green background

Today, I work exclusively in acrylic paint. I spent years using both acrylics and oils, and each had its merits. Oils are slow to dry but exceptionally reliable in colour: what you see as you paint is exactly what you get once the surface is dry. Acrylics dry quickly, which suits the layered, mark-by-mark process of building a Zafer painting, but some colours shift hue as they dry, which requires experience and adjustment. Over time, I came to know the specific behaviour of the colours I use most frequently, which ones drift and by how much, and I learned to account for that as I work. That knowledge, accumulated over years, eventually made acrylics not just a practical choice but the right one. They are now the only medium I use, and the Zafer style has grown with them.