Fikret Otyam: The Painter Who Reported Anatolia — and the Well Scene You Can Now Step Inside

Few Turkish artists carried a sketchbook, a camera and a press card with equal conviction. Fikret Otyam did all three for most of his life, and the result is a body of work in which painting, photography and reportage are hard to separate. His canvases are full of the people he met on the road: headscarved women with large, kohl-lined eyes, children, and the goats that seem to wander into almost every scene.

One of those paintings — a gathering of village women at a well on a golden plain, signed and dated ’98 — is now on ArtFair as an immersive 360° experience. Before you step inside it, here is who painted it.

From a pharmacy in Aksaray to the Academy

Otyam was born in Aksaray, in Central Anatolia, on 19 December 1926, the third of six children. As a boy he worked in his father’s pharmacy and painted whenever he could. After secondary school he went to Istanbul and studied painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts, where he trained in the studio of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu — the painter most associated with bringing Anatolian folk motifs into modern Turkish art. Otyam graduated in 1953, and the lesson stayed with him: art could be modern and still speak the visual language of ordinary people.

A journalist on the road

Otyam began working as a journalist in 1950 at the Istanbul daily Son Saat, and went on to write for papers including Ulus, Dünya and Cumhuriyet over a career that lasted nearly six decades. His most influential reporting came from Eastern and Southeastern Anatolia, where he interviewed farmers, landless villagers and nomadic families and photographed their daily lives. He later gathered these series into books such as Topraksızlar (“The Landless”), Gide Gide, Ha Bu Diyar, Harran ve Irıp and Ey Samandağ Samandağ.

His photographs are now regarded as documents in their own right. Istanbul Modern holds his 1970s photograph Woman Drawing Water from Well, Harran in its photography collection — a reminder of how often wells, water and the women who carry it appear across his work.

The painter of kohl-lined eyes

In Turkey, Otyam is often remembered as the painter of sürmeli gözler — kohl-lined eyes. Veiled or headscarved Anatolian women and goats are the two figures that return again and again in his paintings, set among village houses, fields and the wide, sun-bleached plains of the southeast. He held his first exhibition in 1952 and more than thirty solo shows in Turkey and abroad followed, alongside photography exhibitions such as the Gide Gide series. He was also a founding member of the Mediterranean Journalists Foundation and the Golden Orange Culture and Art Foundation in Antalya, where he lived in later life. He died there on 9 August 2015 and, at his own request, was buried in Hacıbektaş.

The painting: women at the well

The canvas behind ArtFair’s tour gathers almost every element of Otyam’s world in one frame. Two tall white pillars and a timber frame mark a village well; around it, women in white headscarves and long red, blue and green dresses stand among heaped water jars. Goats crowd the foreground, a pair of figures crosses the field to the right, and a line of village houses sits low on the horizon under a pale sky. The palette is almost entirely ochre and gold, so the white scarves and the small bursts of colour carry the composition. The signature in the lower-right corner reads “Otyam ’98”.

Step inside the painting

In Inside the Painting, the canvas becomes a 360° space. You can stand at the well and turn toward the distant pair and the village, drag or swipe to look around, use your phone’s motion sensors, view it in a VR headset, or switch on a spatial soundscape of goats, bells, water and wind. The unaltered original painting is always one tap away, so you can compare the immersive scene with the work as Otyam painted it.

Explore the tour, and discover more immersive works as they are added, on our Painting Tours page.