A Journey through Aesthetic Realms
 
Niska: Painter of the Soul    Part 1   
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Greetings angelic viewers, and welcome to A Journey through Aesthetic Realms on Supreme Master Television. In today’s show, we’ll take an inspiring voyage to the realm of light with the first of our two-part series on contemporary Canadian artist François Lortie, better known as Niska. Called “the Painter of the Soul,” Niska has devoted over 50 years of his life to the ardent quest for God with his paintbrush.

At the age of six, Niska was struck by a city bus when he found himself out of his body and surrounded by bright light. The life-changing moment was followed by 18 months of confinement in a hospital bed. Assigned to the rehabilitation center along with war amputees, he created his first painting under the loving encouragement of his caretakers. It was here that he made his lifetime commitment to spreading the message of light.

I was already painting those lights and my first exhibition [was] when I sent the paintings in Ottawa for the National Gallery in 1954. By this year, I remember, I was like 14 years old, those energies that I felt in my guts, I wanted to help the world. I wanted to help humanity, to change the world, So I associated to my spiritual energy, wanted so much to give, so that’s the strength of power. And of course the light that I associate to [is] the Light of God.

So what would you say will be your life mission? How would you sum it all up?

My life mission was to uplift the people to realize that we are not really human beings. We are divine beings that chose to be on Earth. I think the human experience and this human experience is fun. What is the most important thing in life? It’s your life, live the life, enjoy, you are here to rejoice. So you have to learn meditating on light and finding that you’re a being of light, that you can raise that dimmer. Some people need little lights to start growing until you realize you are the light.

With illuminating colors and smooth flowing strokes, Niska’s paintings glow with happiness, purity, and truth. The indescribable harmony of a soulful experience is brought before the viewer, like a poem, a symphony, a ballet, or an epic, so real that you can almost touch it.

It’s important to start thinking about light and love.

On your dead bed, you don’t ask where is my money, you ask where is the light.

The basic of many of the paintings is you see there are some kind of a circle here. Can you perceive that there is a circle there? You see there? (Right, yes.) Okay. When I was a young boy, I had this bus accident, declared dead, and I was entering that tunnel of light.

And now I know that depending on your religion, at that time I didn't know, I was six years old. I was Christian, so [I’d] meet Jesus. Elona, my wife, is Jewish so she might meet Moses. Others meet Buddha, Ramtha, Krishna. And that became my passion, to paint those circles of life. I've painted them now for 60 some years. I've learned a lot about them.

If I walk into that light right there, I’m going to be passing onto the other side of the light. So what is here on the other side of the light? With all my heart, it’s God.

You’ll see God when you get over this channel of light there. So for most people who think they are dust, they will turn to dust, they’re worth nothing, no, no, no, no. You are the light that will return to light. You are God that will return to God.

Through the profound experience of light and God, Niska arrives at his insightful view of the nature of this worldly existence.

Art evolved over the years. You see in many, many of my paintings. You see that straight line here, you see? And in 1990, I stopped putting dates on the paintings. That was through my spiritual growth and consciousness, that we’re not really immortal; we’re more eternal. I’m not the expert in language but I mean we were not really ever born nor will we really ever die.

We borrow the body for a period of time, so that’s a life span, this is your life, from there to there. So what’s a 50, 75, 100 years, or billions and billions of years? By meaning we are immortal, eternal, meaning that we’ve always been linked to God and we’ll always be, but we might not have our actual vehicle – I call sometimes “a car” that we borrow to visit Her.

We will be back with more on Niska’s paintings and the artist’s insights about his direct experience with God. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

God. I am just fascinated with God.

I realize that we are able to find God and connect [with] Him.

We only find God through our own experience. Did you know that? Nobody can teach; nobody has God. We can inspire you to start on the path and make your path, but you will find it by yourself. They cannot prove God to you, nobody, and nobody will ever. You can prove only God to yourself.

Welcome back to A Journey through Aesthetic Realms on Supreme Master Television. In today’s show, we are featuring Canadian spiritual artist Niska, who is known as “the Painter of the Soul.” To cultivate his connection with God, Niska starts his days with prayer and meditation. Then with fresh inspiration, he delves right into art. He once said in an interview, “It's my life, I meditate and paint, eat and sleep.”

All my life, the purpose of meditation is to contact God. Your inner God, contact this infinite nothingness. You know we think that God is everything but just it’s partial, God is everywhere. But as I painted, I do not realize I was actually meditating; so as I did it full time, I was not, thank God, a school teacher or things like that, to teach art. I love our teachers and to think I was blessed, to be able to paint and paint.

So suddenly I started seeing those lights coming up in my life, like the monks in Tibet or some other places that meditate 4 to 8 hours every day. After a few years they start seeing those lights, they actually see them. So me as I paint them and because if I didn’t see them, I couldn’t paint them, but they took me many, many years to see them. But then also that’s the purpose of meditation, contacting with God and then you grow.

I found out that God is very polite. He’s a good friend, but He’s very polite.

And I think some experts could confirm to you that the average brain functioning between 2 to 5 hundred words a minute; if your emotions are there, it goes fast fast fast. So God is quite polite. So what you want to do with meditation is to lower this scrambling of thoughts fighting all over, and when you get to about 100 words a minute, great, He tries to squeeze a word in, you know? So, He’s so polite that He will not interrupt you. So if you don’t shut up, you’ll never hear about Him.

The paintings of light created after meditation bear the power of inner God connection, touch people’s souls, and benefit even their physical lives. Niska’s wife Elona shares with us her own experience.

Yes, when I was doing my master thesis and I had one of his paintings above my computer. And he said to me, “Why don’t you let yourself go into the light?” He said, “So then you could be inspired and write it faster and it’ll go easier for you.” And I said, “Listen... it’s for McGill, and I need to do an analysis, political and economical and historical. How was the light going to help me?” Because I was just starting my spiritual growth.

I had ideas about it as a kid, but we never learned about it in school. It’s 3 in the morning, and there I was with that painting and I suddenly found myself having this inner dialogue with his painting, and it was helping me connect with my inner light and my inner guide, which I slowly discovered more and more over time. And what happened in the end was what normally would have taken me probably a year – I was working at the time, full time – I did it in three months, weekends and evenings.

I was so inspired by the painting, the words just typed out of my fingers and I started to discover the power of the light. If I hadn’t lived it I would have never known it, and after that when I handed it in, I wrote a lot of things in that thesis that I might normally not have written. And I said, “Oh, I don’t know if they are going like it.” They may fail me because I was quite audacious in what I had to say. It was quite forthright.

I tried to say it diplomatically, but I still said certain things that the paintings encouraged me. They said, “Go for it, go for it.” The light in the paintings said, “Go for it.” But after that when I got back my results in the mail, I opened it up and they wrote that, “The joy of a teacher is when the child surpasses the master,” and I started to cry, you know.

And I realized, I didn’t say I am so bright, but I said the light when you connect with your inner voice and you allow yourself to be inspired, you can reach heights and a sense of boundlessness that you don’t know really exist before. So, that was a life-changing moment for me when I realized I want to spend more time understanding what that was all about, and the power of that, that really transforms your life and brings you to places where you don’t think ever existed.

The life-changing experience of Elona is not an isolated incident. Through contemplating on God’s light, many people have found the source of lasting happiness. In Niska’s words, “With God, you are never alone.”

One of our big, big suffering in humanity presently is loneliness. People live in huge towers and couples can’t keep their parents home, so the little ones are often alone, and the older ones are very alone. We feel alone because we have the illusion, I think, of being disconnected from God. If we knew we are connected to God, how could you feel alone? I know He’s there, He’s helping me all the time. So that’s why I made this beautiful painting “With God, We Are Never Alone.”

We sincerely thank Niska and Elona for sharing with us the essential message of light and God. We will continue with part 2 next week, here on Supreme Master Television.

For more about Niska’s paintings, please visit

Radiant viewers, thank you for your presence on today’s episode of A Journey through Aesthetic Realms. Up next on Supreme Master Television is Vegetarianism: The Noble Way of Living, after Noteworthy News. May Divine light guide us all toward a virtuous, loving, and happy path in life.

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Join us on Friday, April 9, here on Supreme Master Television.
Noble viewers, welcome to A Journey through Aesthetic Realms on Supreme Master Television. In last week’s show, we introduced Canadian artist Niska and his paintings of light. It all began at the tender age of six, when an automobile accident prompted his sudden experience of the spiritual realm of light.

This was just the beginning of Niska’s lifelong journey as an artist with a mission to share the same splendor of light with others. Today, we will complete our two-part interview by seeing how Niska brings the Divine revelation to physical life while spreading the message of love, positivity, and happiness.

If we can step out of the message that we are beings of light, wonderful beings, we just need to turn the “dimmer” up. Stop being two watts, we can be 1,000 watts. Live and be happy. The first thing in life is to be happy. We are beings of light. We are not dust that will return into dust. We are light, and must return to the light.

Niska lives with his wife Elona in a simple house, which also serves as his workshop. They have used the income earned from selling the original artworks to make duplicates of the paintings to share with more people at no cost so that they too can have the opportunity to see them and be inspired.

We do distribute freely for many years. I think last year we almost have given away some 100,000 free reproductions. They were given to all kinds of people that could need them, love them or made fundraiser with them. We [are] willing to give them the reproduction, for charity that we accept and recognize and like what we do.

That’s my dream. I hope to give at least one million away. (Wow.) So it’s a goal, I work on it.

Our only biggest challenge is that we work so much with creating all kinds of things that we don’t sleep. We have so much pleasure sharing the message of the paintings with everybody. So we’re like kids.

Yes, so I’m very touched all the time. Also some people, teaching in school, they use the DVDs, the colors, the pictures we give them free. They have access to and they can download almost everything they want from our site, free of charge. So that’s very pleasurable. Where I live in the borough of Lachine, the mayor has one in his office, the city counselors, the business people, the school teachers. My posters are everywhere. It’s like they adopted me like their child. I’m very proud to be there.

People from all walks of life find themselves drawn to Niska’s artwork and resonate with spontaneous enthusiasm. It is as though what they find in the light-filled is a mirror of themselves. What they experience beyond the canvas is often deeper than words can describe.

He has really, really given a lot, a lot of his love through his paintings. Lots and lots of energy.

It gives me a deep calm, it gives me the desire to see who I am and it gives me a very, very great inner peace.

Whenever I look at his paintings, I have the feeling that I recognize the Divine in me, see myself beautiful, see myself great, and that I see that there is nothing that prevents me to obtain the same richness as his paintings.

The overwhelming responses have grown beyond the borders of Niska’s homeland and are coming from all over the world.

I just thank God to let me see, before I die, the pleasure of where the paintings are really going. I have many, many shows, like 300 shows, in so many places in Europe. And now for the last three, four years, every day we receive mail, e-mail, phones.

We have a folder that grows beautifully. It’s called the Folder of Gratitude, where I get these emails almost every day from people who own his work, and talk about what that light has brought into their life. It’s very touching and meaningful to us.

We will be back with more on Canadian spiritual artist Niska after these messages. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

There are no roads to happiness. Happiness is the road.

Welcome back to A Journey through Aesthetic Realms on Supreme Master Television as we continue our feature on Canadian artist Niska whose paintings of light have inspired many to have a loving and brighter outlook on life. Light and love emanate not only from Niska’s paintings, but also from the artist himself. His unconditional and tender ways have touched the hearts of people around him in everyday life. Niska recounts a heart-warming story about Elona’s daughter, Yaël, with whom he had lived in the same house for 12 years.

When she was young, twelve or thirteen years old, a full teenager, and she selected a little pink painting for her bedroom. I had given her a beautiful mirror, you know, for a young girl for her bedroom, an antique, and then when she was mad she will take out the painting and hide it behind that mirror. So I come in and I see that. Not a word.

I went down, take my car, go a few blocks down the street to the local flower shop and I buy her an orchid, wrapped in see-through paper with the little ribbons and then I bring there, put it on her bedspread and walk away, not a word. And then few hours later walk back, the painting is back on the wall and the flower is in the water.

Today, Yaël has graduated from Harvard University and has become a medical doctor, sharing her own gift of love to many in need of comfort. A few years ago, Niska was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, an age-related neurologic disorder that impairs motor functions. This has become a motivator for him to work harder as he knows that time is ever precious. At the same time, Niska has embraced his condition as part of his life’s purpose, of his service to the world.

To me, I find that Parkinson as opening me doors that will have been like unexpected. You see like this World Parkinson Congress in Washington and New York that chose me for the calendar distributed all over the world, I will never have this responsibility if I didn’t have the Parkinson.

From a mystical point of view, we live in a perfectly harmonious world, nothing ever happens in my life outlook that I didn’t want, I didn’t create. We have the capacity to create us looking sick because everything is an illusion.

I believe children up to age 14, they know who they are. They know they are God. We know we have unlimited power. When I say unlimited, you don’t have a clue [about] anything that happens in the world. You can do a million times more. But because of our mental perception we create our limits. There are no limits. It has been demonstrated that to change your idea on something, you only need to be repeated like seven times.

Medical researches have shown if six or seven people this morning were teamed up together to tell this person, “Hey, you look so bad, you must be sick!” “No, I’m perfectly right.” The second one, the third one, by the seventh time the guy calls the ambulance. The brain ruins all of your capacities with the negative. We are paralyzed with what people taught us. Now as an adult, put them down, put them down. Do and do and refine the Divine being that we are.

As Divine beings, it is human nature to seek light in darkness, and hope in despair. Niska conveys his thoughts about how we can all move from a negative to a positive place in our daily lives.

There’s a strategy: Don’t try to throw the negative away, never. You never make an effort for that. Let’s suppose you only have half hour of pleasure per day. So try to have 35 minutes, work up 40 minutes, work to have an hour, two hours, three hours, and you never make an effort to put the negative away, but the positive that you will have slowly every day in your life. One day, where is it? All the negative would have disappeared from your life.

You just have the will of being positive. Positiveness is emotions that you’ve developed from inside, slowly, and then you become very, very powerful because you see the light. If I only see darkness, it will be very hard to be positive. You can go in the deepest hole in your life but if you keep your high thought over the universe, over the sky, you’re bound one day to see a star. So being positive is more like experiencing. Being positive is not just a wish, it’s an inner emotional reality of your capacities.

As the discussion on positive realization continued, Elona brought up the subject of constructive media and Supreme Master Television.

Can I say something? Also, with the news of the Supreme Master Television, if we would have that on main television, all that positive news all the time, it’s so uplifting. It makes a whole difference.

We need more programs like you have, putting the seeds of beautiful possibilities. I’ll show the nurse who heals the hurt person, then I will recreate healing in the world. So the only way we can is to go back to love and compassion, and talk and think, meditate and develop more organizations like you have.

Everything that you talk about every day will amplify.

Through his paintings, Niska is also amplifying joy and hope in the world, one painting at a time. Through viewing them, people are rediscovering their light within, as the artist eagerly looks forward to the day that the whole world will be illuminated.

I look at this painting, it will probably be chosen by a very young person, like under 10, if the parents agree. Or a very old, 75, 80 years older. Many of the most spiritual people I know, they don’t even knew about it, they just are. So it will probably be chosen by somebody very powerful that enjoys the light, because this one is very powerful…

We would like to express our deep appreciation to the gifted artist Niska and his gracious spouse Elona for generously sharing the beauty of human spirituality through your artworks as well as your love and positivity. May your pure hearts be blessed just as your paintings rekindle the light in others.

For more about Niska’s paintings, please visit

Inspiring viewers, thank you for being with us today on A Journey through Aesthetic Realms on Supreme Master Television. Up next is Vegetarianism: The Noble Way of Living, right after Noteworthy News. May your heart be opened and your noble wishes fulfilled.

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