BerLa

Berrak Ergul Lajoie is a painter artist and photographer based in Montreal. Art has always been her passion and she always seeks ways to express this passion ever since she was a child. She started oil painting when she was 22 years old. Since 2017, she has been working with acrylic medium, sometimes by mixing it with paper, textile, metal or some other materials. She mostly works on portraits but also landscape paintings on which she uses symbols and themes such as "time, life, humanity and women stories". She was born and grew up in Turkey, studied architecture and graduated from Istanbul Technical University Faculty of Architecture. She spent several years working as an architect in different countries until she moved to Montreal. During her professional years, she found a path in architecture which brought her closer to art, however painting was one of her favorite tools to reflect her inner world. She also discovered her interest in photography, when she was a student in faculty of architecture. She bought her first camera and enrolled into a photography course. First, she started taking architectural photographs and then captured many travel photographs through the years. In 2014, she joined “National Geographic Yourshot” and some of her photographs were published on their website in 2015 and 2016. She believes that photography and painting have a strong connection and both feed her imaginary world and help to enrich her visual vocabulary.