painting a city?

[thebiggest]

“I wanted to paint. I wanted to live like the French painters I’d read about in books, but I lacked the strength to create such a world in Istanbul, nor did Istanbul lend itself to the project. Even the worst paintings of the Turkish Impressionists - their view of the mosques, the Bosphorus, wooden houses, snowy streets - pleased me, not as paintings, but as likenesses of Istanbul. If a painting looked like Istanbul, then it wasn’t a good painting; if it was a good painting, it didn’t look enough like Istanbul to suit me. Perhaps this meant that I had to stop seeing the city as a painting, or as a landscape.”

"Istanbul: Memories of a City." Orhan Pamuk, trans. Maureen Freely p. 291

that's how I feel about my dissertation. Sigh.