This painting was an act of resurrection rooted in a single evening walk. Painted after a stroll through the streets of Bostancı, it depicts a manor Rüstamlı encountered by chance and could not stop thinking about - a building so grand it read more like a palace than a humble abode. The structure had once belonged to a general. By the time she found it, it stood empty, its grounds sealed off, its price tag running into the millions, and no buyer in sight. A house built for a full and lavish life, sitting unclaimed.
She knew that when she reached home she had to paint it that same night.
In the painting, the manor sits inside its own sanctified garden, walled in by cypress and blossoming trees, doves crossing the sky above it in pairs. Below, in the water, the women of the yalı take to their boats - a tradition as old as the Bosphorus itself, an evening spent gliding along the shoreline rather than confined indoors. Rüstamlı renders this scene through her signature punctuation technique, the same patient accumulation of dots she has built her practice on for fifty years, here used to bring colour and motion back to a structure the city itself had abandoned.
The manor in life stands empty and silent. In this painting it is full - full of birds, full of the sea, full of women out on an evening sail, full of every colour a forgotten general's house once deserved to live through.
