Turkey Drawing Tours

With Ms. Trici Venola;

RUNAWAY ART IN ISTANBUL

Trici Venola “spent half [her] life as a digital illustrator in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles before chucking it all to wander and draw in Turkey.”

In an era where hardly any artists knew how to create with the new technology, she created groundbreaking art for games, TV and print by applying traditional techniques with digital tools. Attention to line, form and chiaroscuro got her work when most computer artists were creating floating spheres. Some of Venola’s early digital work now merits its own websites, put up by the people who grew up playing those games. A few years ago Venola simply disappeared from the computer scene. Her imagery haunts the Internet, but nobody knows where she is. We do. She lives down the street, and for the past ten years she’s been drawing all things Turkish.

Twenty years making art with digital tools can erode one’s ability to create with traditional media. Venola was horrified to discover, on her first trip to Europe, that she had lost the ability to draw offline. “ I drew before I could talk, so the talent was there,” she says, “but the line quality was not. In drawing, practice is the key. I just kept drawing by hand even though it looked awful to me.” After months of sketchbook experimentation she came to Istanbul for the first time in 1999. “I came off the plane drawing and something crystallized,” she says.

Combining a skill for rendering buildings and nature with a flair for portraiture, Venola has filled over twenty-four sketchbooks with Plein Aire drawings of Istanbul, Antalya, Kapadokya and Eastern Turkey. The drawings take anywhere from two to fifteen hours and often incorporate faces into landscapes. The first collection in book form, DRAWING ON ISTANBUL, was published in Istanbul in 2006 and is available on Amazon. com. Venola’s work in Turkey has been extensively reviewed in the Turkish press, both in English and in Turkish... She works as a digital illustrator, sending roughs and final art through the Internet to clients here and abroad. A recent career expansion was illustrating children’s books. She takes private commissions, distributes her own books, gives lessons and continues to improve as an artist. Turkey’s current mania for change intensifies her enthusiasm for documenting this place at this time in history. “God draws this stuff,” she says, “I just hold the pen.”

THE GATE-Istanbul-Guestroom-April 2009

BLAST SUPPER BLAST SUPPER ©2005 by Trici Venola Works. Appeared in the Christmas Issue of Hustler 2005, about "Prayer Breakfasts" at the White House. A nasty, angry project, and one that gave me enormous satisfaction. I'm proud to work for Hustler. God bless Larry Flynt, the man who took on the Religious Right, the Republican Party in general, and George W. Bush.