People sometimes ask whether my paintings are inspired by architecture. The answer is yes, but not in the obvious sense. I do not paint buildings, streets, or interiors. What has remained with me from architecture is a way of seeing.

In architecture, every project began with a place. Before drawing a single line, it was necessary to understand the site, the surrounding buildings, and the project’s purpose. A building cannot exist on its own. It belongs to a larger environment, and every decision is influenced by that environment.

Painting begins under completely different conditions.

The canvas has its own boundaries, and everything that matters happens inside them. There is no site to respond to and no practical problem to solve. The composition does not need to fit into a neighbourhood or accommodate people. It only needs to make sense within itself.

I find this difference fascinating. In architecture, the surroundings shape the work. In painting, the work creates its own world.

But I still carry architectural thinking with me when I paint. The principles I learned through architecture remain present. I still search for balance, tension, rhythm, and proportion, but these qualities are no longer tied to a building. They exist only through the relationships between colours, shapes, and spaces on the canvas.

The subjects of my paintings are not specific places, yet they come from years of looking carefully at the built environment. Walking through cities, entering buildings, noticing walls, streets, openings, shadows, and materials gradually forms a visual memory. With time, those memories lose their descriptive details. What remains are relationships rather than images.

This is why my work is abstract. I am not trying to represent what I have seen. I am interested in what remains after observation has been filtered by memory. The painting is not a picture of a place; it is a space where my imagined vision of that place takes form.