"Mehmet Gürsoy, teacher and entrepreneur, paints with delicate finesse, accepting then breaking the rules and he has set the new standard, becoming the leader, most artists choose subtly to follow"

"Prof. Henry Glassie (chairman of Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania, Co-Director of Turkish Studies and College Professor of Folklore at the Indiana University)"

He was born in the south-western Turkish city of Denizli in 1950.

Originally a student of Prof. Muhsin Demironat, he has devoted 24 years of his life to art of Çini. While being based on 16th Century art, his work brings to the contemporary world a unique interpretation of Iznik, rather than being an exact replica of that period.

On a competition organised as a part of the 1986 '1st International Symposium of Çini' he was awarded first prize for vase, first place for plate and second place for panel decoration. His work is at constant display at the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations of Ankara Turkey, and Santa Fe Ethnographic Museum and Indiana University Museum of Art in the USA. The artist, who has also been lecturing at the Çini Department of Dumlupınar University of Kütahya for the last three years, has exhibited his work in several countries. He actually carries on his work in the new capital of Çini, Kütahya.

You can see it in any major tourist area in Turkey, in small shops and large, in bazaars and neighborhood stores: row upon row of Turkish ceramics -- a dizzying array of plates, bowls, vases, pitchers, coffee cups, ashtrays, tiles -- in short, anything that can be fashioned from clay. And the name most frequently mentioned in connection with it is Kutahya, a pleasant city about an hour's drive from Eskisehir in Central Anatolia.

Armed with insufficient money and almost maxed-out credit cards, I decided to head for this mecca of pottery-lovers. My goal was to meet Mehmet Gursoy, an artist whose work I had become familiar with in Ankara, and whose pieces clearly stand far above the rest in terms of beauty and technical excellence. After perusing countless small shops crammed with a profusion of ceramics so garish that it left me wondering why I had come here, I fled to the peace and quiet of Gursoy's shop and relaxed in the cool elegance of his finely crafted work.

Gursoy is a master cinici, or maker of cini, defined by Henry Glassie in his book "Turkish Traditional Work Today" as "cognate with china" and meaning "tile" but which encompasses "all pottery painted underglaze on a composite white body, including tiles..." Gursoy creates pieces based on the white ceramics known as Iznik cini, decorated with blues, turquoise, green and red, that were produced in Iznik and Kutahya from the 15th to 17th centuries. But he doesn't just copy old pieces or make reproductions; he extracts principles from them to use in new creations, adding his own interpretation and innovations to the original compositions.                More...