ÖZGÜN YILMAZOK
The author, Özgün Yılmazok, is deeply interested in paintings and art history from early years of his childhood. In addition to his degrees in civil engineering and his professional engineering career, he has kept his passion for art and art history alive through different activities.
He attended drawing workshops in an artist’s studio in Ankara between 2007-2009 and produced his own art pieces. He accumulated his knowledge in art history by conducting personal research, collecting sources and having comprehensive museum visits throughout Europe over a long period of time.
Since 2012, Özgün has been analysing famous art pieces from different periods based on their styles, symbols, characteristics and sharing his own texts in Turkish with art enthusiasts on his web page Sanata Başla!. As of 2024, Sanata Başla! contains around 300 different painting analyses from 5 main periods in art history covering a 600-year period (1350-1960). Start Art! is the extension of Sanata Başla! in English. The existing analyses in Turkish are being progressively translated into English by the author and shared in Start Art!.
Özgün carried his art project further in 2015 and started conducting workshops on analysing paintings in Ankara. He conducted three different workshop series – “Renaissance”, “Baroque-Rococo” and “18th-19th Century Art Movements” – several times and met art history enthusiasts in his classes face-to-face. The workshops combined the painting analyses of Sanata Başla! with systematically arranged technical and historical aspects of each period and presented a comprehensive content in art history.
Özgün moved to Gothenburg at the beginning of 2017. Since 2018 Özgün conducted 16 workshops in Gothenburg on Renaissance, Baroque-Rococo, 18th-19th Century Art Movements, Visual Analysis and Modern Art. He currently continues with his live workshops in Gothenburg, museum tours abroad with his students and Youtube projects (Start Art! Youtube Channel) while taking art history courses from Oxford University.