He completed his doctorate in 1974 with his thesis "Human and Animal Figure in Turkish Painting". He received the title of Associate Professor in 1978 with his thesis titled "The Formation Process of Contemporary Turkish Painting and Bedri Rahmi Eyüpoğlu". He was the chairman of the Plastic Arts Board of the Ministry of Culture for a year. In 1980, he shared the Sedat Simavi Foundation Visual Arts Award with the painter Adnan Varnca.
Erol, who assumed the post of the Chairman of the Plastic Arts Board of the Ministry of Culture in 1978-1979, worked as a lecturer in the Painting Department of Gazi Education Faculty in 1983-1987.
The master artist retired from Hacettepe University, where he became a professor in 1987, voluntarily in 1990. Turan Erol has opened many solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions.
Receiving the title of State Artist in 1991, the artist also received the Sedat Simavi Foundation Visual Arts Award, Hacettepe University 50th Year Service Award, Mimar Sinan University 50th Year Service Award, Gazi University Service Award, and METU Senate Honor Award.
Turan Erol also designed the cover of Yaşar Kemal's book titled "Demirciler Çarşısı Cinayeti | The Murder of the Blacksmiths' Bazaar". The artist, who was awarded the title of "state artist" in 1991, was one of the founding members of the Group of Ten | Onlar Group.
TURAN EROL'S ART
Turan Erol regards his own painting as a natural extension of the dormitory painting movement, which brought a local content to our contemporary art in the 1938-1946 period. For a painter who has always kept his relationship with the nature of his homeland alive from the very beginning, this is an apt interpretation. In fact, Turan Erol, in his paintings, starting from his early youth, when he was passionately attached to the art of painting, to more recent years, reflected the environments in which he lived and wandered, and processed the intimate and poetic effects of nature at levels that would extend to a kind of contemporary local romanticism. Although it had previously adhered to a geometric composition framework determined by hard lines, horizontal and vertical lines that intersect each other with a semi-cubic, semi-constructive tendency, it has turned to a softer and blotchy, at the same time, colorist understanding starting from the 1960s.
He made the effective appearances of desolate pieces of nature the subject of his art. He is considered more of a landscape painter, although from time to time still life is rarely included in figure arrangements. The main element that determines the artist's landscape paintings is a calm and peaceful atmosphere. Beyond the clear and definite effects, he dealt with the clear and lasting impressions that the nature viewed with the naked eye would create on a painter. It was frequently used as an insistent motif, especially in his works after 1970. Bodrum paintings draw attention as the predominant work of this period with their calm and smooth effects. The great sea views, in which the coastlines are pushed to the edges in the integrating harmony of blue and pale grays, appear as a stage reached with disparaging elements in his art, as an elite goal. This purpose, which is also related to the semantic associations behind silence and stillness, is also valid for Turan Erol's pastel and watercolor paintings.