Güneri İçoğlu

Categories: Literature, Caricature

About the artist

Hi there, I was born in September 1965, in Sivas. I began to write and draw comic strips in my very young age in the legendary comic magazine Gırgır’s traditional master-apprentice training, like most of us as caricaturists. Later on, I was one of them, drawing both for Gırgır and Fırt magazines. Then the comic magazine Limon was founded and I joined in this new team. Limon comic magazine brought new ideas and changes to the comic strips and caricature by introducing interesting sociological aspects into the equation and holding the pulse of public perfectly.  After a while, Limon magazine has taken the name of Leman, keeping its reformist attitude and style and I carried on my writing and drawing adventure with them. I still produce work for Leman comic magazine. My well-known columns are; Firavunun Laneti (The Curse of the Pharaoh) caricature column, a column with visuals and photography named as Dumur Detayları (Paralyzing Details) and the adventures of my famous character Gönül Adamı (Man of Romance)…

Whilst, I studied and graduated from Academy of Fine Arts, Stage and Camera Branch, Theatre Department. After that, I have got my MA degree in History of Art, ITU (İstanbul Technical University), Faculty of Social Sciences.  I was deeply touched by and interested in Classical Turkish Music and I was involved in it again within the frame of master-apprentice tradition.  However, the minute I became conscious about my being, I knew what I was tailored for; humour, drawing and chatting.  That is why it feels a bit bizarre to talk about which school I graduated from, or which department of it and etc. At the end it is always the humour, always the caricature, and always the magazine that matters and this constitutes the format of my work and soul. So I wonder whether there is something else as complicated as writing his own biography for a caricaturist.  We are known through the comic strips we write and draw.  It is always the character, we draw is known and recognised, not us. After this realization, it feels quite hard to tell about myself; even it is a paragraph of a short biography.  I got used not to be recognized by not being recognized over and over again, so that I can even hardly finish the biography of few sentences in 15 days. Certainly, as a caricaturist we should always be in the shadow, our lives and faces are not important, the important thing is the faces of our characters. If we gain fame than our characters stay in shadow and they cannot be effective. The sincerity of the character should clear us off the stage; try to visualise it as a shadow puppetry screen.  If the puppeteer appears on the screen than the credibility of puppetry is lost and the effect of it disappears. If the character is strong enough, then s/he is the real thing. So the reader does not care about the writer-drawer anymore but is only curious about the adventures of the character and this is all about the caricature craft. That is why it is better for the reader if a caricaturist writes the biography of his/her character rather than his/her own.  

My admiration to İstanbul and curiosity to Classical Turkish Music led me to the spelled lives of masters like Neyzen (the player of the instrument ney) Aziz Dede, Tanburi (the player of the instrument tambur) Cemil Bey and many more, from where Man of Romance was created. Man of Romance, whom I draw for more than 20 years, was born in İstanbul. Our character whose name is Yekta, was brought up and at the same time trained as a player of both ney and tambur by the last great generation of masters of Classical Turkish Music and by, in contemporary talk ‘unpopular’, art experts of the unknown markets on the slopes of İstanbul.  Mr. Yekta as a music master and a great artist has difficulties in living in a materialistic world of today.  He lives in an old house of a neighbourhood by the Bosphorus, surrounded by all wooden houses; he makes his living on fishing by his boat named Kısmet and collecting edible plants like hibiscus, lamb’s ear etc. from the few left greens on the Bosphorus hills. Except than few neighbours whom he is in close contact, few old shopkeepers and his researcher and musicologist friend Jan Piyer who has come from Paris and settled in İstanbul just because of his admiration to Mr. Yekta and his art, nobody is aware of Man of Romance.  In a tough world, full of materialistic ambition, nobody has tolerance to sensitivity, so they can neither realize the Man of Romance nor the flame of love within him.  Musicologist Jan Piyer feels sorry for his situation because he researches on his art and music and knows that he is a great music master. He mentions to Man of Romance that if he were in Paris, he would have been living a high standard life with the talent he had, and tries to persuade him to go to Sorbonne University, Musicology Department. But no chance, it is impossible for Man of Romance to leave his only love, İstanbul and cannot think of leaving his ever-hungry seagulls that he feeds with bread and bagels that are bought with his last pennies. He does not want to be realized, known or live a comfortable life, he is a man of romance, so on the contrary he tries to get rid off his ego, to burn with love like the moth turning around the candle. The only reason of his being is love. Other than this everything is transient.  Related to this vision, he constantly discusses East-West philosophies with Jan Piyer.

Whilst, the spelled world surrounding the Man of Romance is changing rapidly and getting destroyed. He tries his best to protect the old local shops of the area from closing down and the old wooden houses that are burning down. This is the short biography of Man of Romance.  

My greetings and love…