Recently, high school student members of the Art Club at Bilkent Erzurum Laboratory School (BELS) created a black-and-white painting of Prof. İhsan Doğramacı to celebrate his 101st birthday. The painting is to serve as a permanent, decorative art work for the BELS middle school lobby.
The students used a variation of the grid method of painting to create the work. This method, an inexpensive, low-tech way to reproduce and/or enlarge an image, involves drawing a grid over a reference photo, then drawing a grid of equal ratio on the work surface. The image is painted on this new surface, focusing on one square at a time until the entire image has been transferred.
For the BELS project, each student used a small piece of the grid from an original photo of Prof. Doğramacı, without knowing the subject matter of the complete photo. They were asked to copy the small-square image onto a larger square canvas. Proportion and value of shapes and tones were interpreted by the students. Thus, each square had its own “personality”; those individual personalities were still evident in the final piece when all the squares were assembled together.
Other BELS activities to mark Hocabey’s birthday included displays in the school, letters to Prof. Doğramacı and original songs by student groups. The highlight was “Selam Sana Doğramacı” sung by the Middle School choir. The song was written by Ömer Türkmenoğlu and had its premiere when the Middle School choir, accompanied by the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra, sang it in Erzurum.