A Dream Scene in Mudanya

A Dream Scene in Mudanya

Pencil Drawing, 2019 (A scene from an animated short, a work in progress)

Created and described by Akile Nazlı Kaya.

[light ambient music fades in]

A black and white pencil drawing of a young girl looking out to sea at night, where she is surrounded by multiple moons that shine bright in various different sizes. 

[pencil sounds]

She is located on the lower left side of the drawing; she is drawn from the back, standing and gazing out with a relaxed posture so that we can feel a peaceful atmosphere surrounding the whole scene. 

[waves lapping on shore]

She has big curly hair and wears a simple dress, leggings and boots. On the right lower side of the drawing, there is the biggest moon, which dominates the whole scene, and it is twice as big as the girl. The girl takes up about a third of the height of the drawing, but she seems quite tiny by the moons. The moons are floating  close to her, as if she could touch them with her hand, which makes the scene dreamy and surreal. 

[slow contemplative piano melody]

The girl’s hair is in big curls, almost circular – they have a similar shape to the moons. The moons are drawn in a two-dimensional form as if they are made from paper. The horizon is placed very low, making the picture even more two dimensional without much depth. It is an orderly yet busy image that makes the viewer feel hypnotized but at the same time feels calm and rested. 

[soft footsteps on the beach]

Each moon has a bright paper white color with a soft grainy texture on the surface filled with a few lines and dots. There is a white halo that surrounds them and gradually shades into the sky, which is completely black and is drawn with scratchy pencil lines. The sea, which is down below the moons and the girl, is quite dark and has few waves. The areas where the moons are close to the sea are in lighter shades. The whole drawing has sharp edges with rounded corners as if in old photographs, and some of the moons are spilling out of the edges of the frame.

A tiny metaphor is hidden in this picture. It was actually a dream that I had more than 10 years ago. In the dream, I was in Mudanya, a summer village in Bursa, standing by the sea of Marmara at night, looking at the many many moons around me. So that young girl is me. I started to draw the picture a few years ago, in 2019 and by that time I was in the process of having in vitro fertilization. As I completed the picture, I suddenly realized the fact that the moons actually look like the eggs collected from ovaries (magnified under a microscope)!

So, for me, this drawing is about amazement and, at the same time, hope.

[music and ambience fade]