“I DRAW BROKEN PEOPLE. BROKEN HEARTS, BROKEN POCKETS, BROKEN SPIRITS.” –Arif Buz

AWB Founder Walter L. Meyer talks about Arif Buz and his artwork

I had the extraordinarily good fortune of meeting Arif while visiting the Turkish Aegean town of Ayvalik in August 2019 with my artist friend Yigit Yazici and his girlfriend Pinar (today his wife). One day while walking through Ayvalik’s At Arabacilari Meydani (Horse-Cart Drivers Square), Yigit suddenly ducked into a lace curtained doorway. Beckoning Pinar and me to follow, we found ourselves in a small hairdressing salon. Before I had time to take in my surroundings, Yigit bounded upstairs. We followed. The top of the staircase opened into a small art studio. Several people were seated there, including cherubic, white-curly-haired Arif Buz.

Over wine and friendly conversation (most of which I didn’t understand as my Turkish was pretty meager then), Arif walked us through a lot of his work. Though the spoken words may have been vague, his artwork was perfectly lucid. It didn’t take long to fall in love with the local people he portrayed with such clear-eyed honesty and empathy.

That was the one and only time I met Arif, who died a little over two years later in January 2022. Since 2019, I’ve wanted to arrange an exhibition of his work—either online here or in some brick-and-mortar gallery—but “things” always got in the way, including the COVID pandemic.

Now let me tell you a little bit about what I’ve learned since then of Arif’s life. In the spirit of complete transparency, everything you’ll read here is a product of my online research.

Arif was born in Altinova, a little south of Ayvalik’s town center. He trained locally as a barber, but at 16 moved to Istanbul to learn to be a ladies’ hairdresser (a more lucrative trade). Noticing that he was constantly drawing cartoons on newsprint, his hair instructor bought him a set of paints (bless you, Mina Samancioglu)—setting him on a new path, although he continued working as a hairdresser throughout his life. Lacking an art education, Arif read about art and poured over exhibition catalogues. He later credited the early 20th-century modern artists Pissarro, Utrillo, Orhan Peker, and Fikret Mualla as sources of inspiration. The latter two are Turks whose work often focused on street life and humble subjects.

Moving back to Ayvalik, he married Camile (also a hairdresser), and moved into the two-story building on Horse-Cart Drivers Square. He continued to live there for more than four decades. Arif’s been quoted as saying he could draw this square with his eyes closed, having memorized its every corner over the years. Immediately opposite his home was the Cagdas Cayevi (Modern Teahouse), the setting for so much of his work. A constant and keen observer of life, Arif sketched his subjects on pieces of cardboard, later transforming them into oil paintings in his studio above the hair salon.

Arif’s subjects are Ayvalik’s common folk, from simit sellers and camel handlers to tea drinkers who are sometimes animated and other times nearly comatose. Perhaps his main focus, though, are Ayvalik’s horse-cart drivers, their decorated carts, and naturally, their horses.

Arif’s body of work preserves a soon-to-be bygone era. But more importantly, through his work he said to those he painted, “I see you.”

I hope you will be comfortable with the somewhat unorthodox nature of this exhibition, and its lack of technical information about the artwork displayed. I want to thank my friend, author Muhsine Arda for explaining to me the somewhat cryptic captions that accompany several of the exhibited pieces. My being an “accidental collector,” I of course bought one of Arif’s paintings in 2019.