I use acrylic paint and oil paint to create my Zafer style paintings. Acrylics have the great advantage of drying quickly compared to oils who takes its time and mine. One of the disadvantages of acrylic paint is that some colours have a tendency change hue after drying. This is a serious problem when the painter is demanding in terms of colour tones he desires. Oil paint do not have this tendency and is more reliable. With time, I learnt a lot about the colours used in my Zafers. The colours in the Zafer paintings (compared to a classical painting where the colours are mixed upfront on the paint palette and placed on the canvas) are placed separately and visually mixed by the viewer. This principle is like the offset printing technique where four colours (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black) are used to create millions of colours. The juxtaposition of these four colours in a precise order allows the printer to reproduce complex photographs on paper. In a Zafer painting, I can paint a plain blue background and then paint on top of this hundreds of yellow triangles. Seen from afar, the viewer’s eyes will mix the blue from the background and the yellow triangles, and the mixture will give the viewer the illusion that this surface is green. (Blue + yellow = Green) In nearly all my Zafer paintings I use this technique to create illusions of colours.
In paintings we talk about warm and cold colours. The warm colours are parented to the sun, yellow, red, orange, and certain browns etc. The cold colours are found in shadows, blue, purple, violet etc. The juxtaposition of colours in the Zafers technique gives me the options of “warming” or “cooling” a surface. If I add yellow dots on a green background, this green will be warmer. If I add blue dots on the sane green surface, it will cool the surface. In the Zafer painting, I count on the viewer to mix the colours visually.
