Self Portrait (2025) Original Watercolour by Sibel Kucukbingol

This is a self-portrait, but not about how I look. It is about how it feels to be inside my own head.

I painted this in one sitting. Watercolor does not allow you to hide or fix - you have to be honest. The black ink lines are fast, uncorrected, like the way thoughts actually move. Some are confident, some are searching. They overlap, they interrupt each other.

The warm washes of sienna and peach are the quiet parts - the skin, the breath, the stillness. And then there are the red and yellow threads. They are not my hair. They are what lives in my hair - memory, restlessness, the noise that never fully leaves. The red is what I remember, the yellow is what I hope for.

I left much of the paper white. I need empty space to breathe.

This is me, not as a face in a mirror, but as a current - still looking directly at you, still trying to hold still while everything moves.

18 x 24 inch / 45.7 x 61 cm, unframed.

Materials used:

Watercolor

Details:

• Watercolour on Paper
• One of a kind artwork
• Size: 45.72 x 60.96 x 0.25cm (unframed) / 45.72 x 60.96cm (actual image size)
• Signed certificate of authenticity
• Style: Unspecified
• Subject: People and portraits