Dark Emotions as Defiance
Should art celebrate the shadow feelings—rage, fear, pain? Artist Gamze Seckin dares to expose the complex emotional terrain of her watercolor women.
In the world of art, an artist can explore beauty, love, and joy with relative ease. Such emotions are expected, celebrated—sometimes subtly required by institutions and audiences alike. And within the artistic psyche, these acceptable feelings come with little friction or resistance. But what of hate, anger, fear, and envy? Should an artist never explore these darker, more taboo human emotions? Are we willing to sit in our own discomfort when confronted with a visual representation of feelings that bring us more shame than relief? Visual artist Gamze Seckin gives us an opportunity to embrace that discomfort. Her figurative work is striking and expressive—mostly female figures alone staring into the distance with irritation, grief, rage, and other “negative” emotions etched into their visage.
For Seckin, embracing and expressing the full range of human emotions in her artwork is as much about authentic self-connection as it is about healing. “All those emotions that are normal for all humans, are still looked down upon and people can’t really express them, especially in a work environment,” Seckin said during an interview with Artists Up Close. “It’s a big taboo. You can’t be emotional, especially if you’re a woman, you cannot bring your true self to work, and everything is bottled up. So, I think most of my work is about the personal emotions that we carry around, especially if you have had a challenging childhood. If you were abused, you need to have a voice, right? So, that’s where the roots of my art are coming from, but it’s not limited, and I’ll see where it goes over the years. But I’m still playing with those feelings.”
Emotions are gendered across societies: men must never cry and women who rage are punished harshly. In the Harvard research article “Can An Angry Woman Get Ahead?” the authors argue that women who show anger are systemically disciplined by almost all facets of society. But in the art world, does this rule still apply? There are no definitive studies on how emotion is gendered in visual art, but it’s likely that these biases persist implicitly—shaping what artists express and how viewers interpret it, especially when left unexamined. And this is what’s so compelling about Gamze Seckin’s work, she is intentionally examining and expressing these shadow emotions in her work and giving audiences, especially women, an opportunity to see those emotions mirrored back to them.
In Seckin’s watercolor portrait, “Too Late” (2024), anger emerges as a complex, nuanced emotion. The figure’s downturned lips and heavy lids convey irritation laced with exhaustion and condescension, as if the subject of her ire is beneath her. Her smeared eye makeup suggests lingering grief, while her fiery red hair and flushed cheeks hint at a quiet rage simmering just beneath the surface. This is how emotion is experienced in real life—rarely pure, always layered. To recognize that would mean acknowledging the mourning within the rage—the grief that makes it human. Seckin takes us there, coaxing us away from the impulse to flatten women’s emotional interiority.
“I’m from Turkey,” Seckin said, “where women are raised in a culture that molds you to be quiet and proper, and nice and not verbal.” Seckin described her family of origin as dysfunctional abusive, an experience that left her with many emotional and mental scars. But thirty years ago, she began healing those wounds through art. “I put my frustration into painting. I don’t have those paintings from that time, but they were quite dark, expressive paintings. And as I painted and just showed it to a small circle around me, I felt relief and hope because those paintings opened up some discussions, and people started saying, ‘Oh, I feel that way.’ That gave me motivation and encouragement, and helped me realize that I’m not alone in certain feelings or some of my observations. Even if I cannot say it vocally or express it in words, then maybe I can just paint it and it will resonate with some people, and motivate, encourage, and inspire them.”
There are many emotions we rarely see reflected back at us in art; Seckin’s “Seriously?” (2024) perfectly embodies one of those feelings—incredulity. The figure looks at us with a baffled sense of disbelief. But there is also naivety, with just a small hint of fear. The dark blue stripe that severs the head from the neck seems to represent a disconnection of the mind—from her body but also the outside world. It’s possible that she isn’t just shocked about what she has witnessed; she can no longer trust her mind’s ability to perceive the world as it really is.
“I’m very alone,” said Seckin when I asked why most of her watercolor figures were solitary. “I have major trust issues. And I have learned to either disassociate or survive on my own. There is some strength, vulnerability, and also some calmness in being alone. I have thought about [adding more figures]. I ask myself: Do I want to put more? No, I want them to be alone and see their strength and solitude, and embrace all the emotions alone and get over it alone.”
Before becoming a full-time visual artist, Seckin worked as a computer engineer for 30 years in a male-dominated industry she credits with cultivating her willingness to self-advocate and endure the painful journey that learning watercolor requires. Seckin said that working as an engineer instilled in her a healthy respect for being organized, scheduling, and perseverance but that there were moments when being one of the few women in the industry made her feel like she had to fit into an existing mold to earn acceptance. “But in the art realm, I allowed myself to just be,” Seckin said. “I am okay to take risks here, to stand out, and while doing that, fail or embarrass myself, so to speak. So, it just gave me more confidence to be myself without apologizing for who I am.”
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