Today’s Enlightening Entertainment will be presented in Turkish, with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Thai.

Welcome, art-loving viewers to today's episode of Enlightening Entertainment. Today, we are travelling to a land of an ancient civilization, Türkiye (Turkey), to meet a genuinely gifted painter. Ms. Emine Güler has been inspired since childhood by the colors and images of central Anatolia, a place abundantly blessed by a rich cultural and natural heritage.

My works started perhaps before writing, before learning to read and write. Actually I have been drawing as early as I could remember. Naturally, the interactions are back in my earliest childhood. During my childhood, I was wondering about the ancient time, I was trying to find out about the lives in the ancient ruins by imagining; this I think was pure curiosity, and this curiosity gave rise to more mythological thoughts. I started to go back to the very beginning of the evolution of humankind. Naturally, they say there is no limit to the imagination.

Ms. Emine Güler was born in Konya, in the Central Anatolian region of Turkey. Konya was the hometown of the great Sufi poet and theologian, Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi. In Konya, vast wheat fields glow in the sun with amber light, as an endless horizon reveals the land’s beautiful brown shades.

I simply reflected earth, the soil in my first paintings. I was using mineral oxide colors and these paintings were inspired from the earth. I even gave the light using transparency, I mean with the browns or blues I use. Making use of the whiteness of the canvas, I just give the whiteness of light.

Naturally, there are reflections of traditions in the paintings, like the ones featuring horse figures. They are much connected with Anatolia. In Anatolia, when the father agrees to a son-in-law, the daughter marries this man, the girl goes to her new home. She both cries and goes. The name of this painting is also “I both cry and I go.” And traditionally brides traveled to their new homes on horseback. In other words, the feelings in my pictures are rooted in Anatolia.

Since there are certain abstractions in the painting, the figures are not very clear. But I made them like that on purpose. The artist must leave a little bit of imagination to the beholder as well, the beholder should be allowed to think over the painting and find the depth; actually the moment he finds it, he has established a bond with the painting. I named my concept in my paintings “the hidden impressions,” meaning there is more to find in the painting, but hidden.

Emine Güler is a prolific artist who has held at least 20 exhibitions so far, with the latest at the Hagia Sophia Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. The museum, which once used to be a church and a mosque, is a timeless shrine of history, spirituality and aesthetics.

I don't accept that there is a single living being who doesn't have faith. And everyone would absolutely have one belief even deep inside. More accurately, the world is such a wonderful place and there are so many wonderful creations, that, it should come from some source and such beauties have necessarily been created in a way or another by the power of creation.

Ms. Güler has developed a unique painting technique and an elegantly detailed yet mysteriously enchanting style.

In my paintings, as I call them the “hidden impressions,” the past is certainly carried to our day, with experiences lived in the past lives. That is the concealed purpose, because according to the laws of the world, nothing existing vanishes and nothing can be created from the nonexistent. So, in one way or another we continue to carry the traces of the past. The soil which has hosted people since many centuries continues to carry the traces of living beings ever present on it.

For Ms. Güler, painting itself is a meditative experience.

When I am deeply concentrated in painting, my contact with my surrounding really stops. I am detached from the world where I am working. I go back to my thoughts as a child. Just like describing the world to someone who can not see and you describe him the external world, his surroundings, this and that.

In this painting, just before the exhibition in Hagia Sophia, on the days when I started to get ready for this exhibition, I had a dream and I was awakened by the strength of the dream. But it was an awakening in my dream and in fact I was still asleep, my mind was so busy with the traces of past life experiences. I reflected many types of creatures, experiences on the canvas without being aware of my action. I solved the mystery of the birds by myself at a later time, which are found in almost all my paintings.

Before, when I depicted a piece of land, a monument, there were always birds beside it. Of course, I was continuously making observations and I found out that, without an exception, all old buildings had special places where birds made their nests. Of course, there any many types of birds around such places. Like the pigeons present in and on Haghia Sofia

What about these globes? Everyone has a world belonging to him or every era has its own specific world. Actually, in this world there are reflections and things like these you see here. The worlds are held by hands or there are actually two, three of them. So it represents that everyone has a world belonging to him.

Ms. Güler’s paintings exude a spiritual air. They contemplate on the deep meaning of life and the phenomena beyond the surface that the physical eyes cannot see.

If a figure arises here, just behind it there are birds, it continues with birds, birds, a new place, a new world, a new composition, a dream, and there, the impressions, like there will be dreams within the dream again. Some figures in the picture do view the painting and maybe they are beholding the beholders of the painting.

Because I feel the eye of a beholder when I am painting, like some figures in the painting, and everyone has his or her own world in his or her own hands. As you know, there are many lives coexisting within the world as we say there are many worlds within a world. Even if I do not always do there can be an elephant or a peacock in my painting. In this one, again a mythological merman, different places, stories...

Making a journey into the past is amusing for me, it also reflects joyfully in my painting and painting them is also a great delight. I do not do pre-drawings in my paintings. Or in other words, there are no pre-drawn figures on the canvas or the surface, there are no lines, pencil drawings. The painting directly forms itself. When starting a painting, I start at a single point and the painting grows by itself.

Once, the artist was inspired to paint the historical region of Cappadocia, a central region in Turkey that, till that time, she had never seen before. The outcome of the painting was remarkably surprising.

My paintings, maybe essentially got created from me, in idea and thinking, in aesthetics, but when I saw the natural structure of Cappadocia, I saw that the place and my imagination overlapped almost the same.

The underground city in Cappadocia, a 12-story structure below the ground, is the foundation for these forms. The pigeons I use in my paintings are also an outcome of the connection I established with the dovecotes (pidgeon houses) that exist very concentratedly in Cappadocia.

Currently, Ms. Güler contributes her talents through teaching art classes in private schools and working as a curator at the Yesilköy 2001 Art Gallery in Istanbul, Turkey. When she herself was being trained as a master artist, she once received cherished advice from her teacher about perseverance.

He told her: “When you feel desperate about creating something, go out and watch a worker trying to open up rocks with a sledgehammer. Seeing a massive rock turn into pieces with the 100th stroke of the hammer, you will understand that it is not the 100th stroke but the 99 strokes before that is what actually fractures it.”

At this moment, I don’t have a plan as to what will be drawn, what kind of painting this will be, what colors will be needed. As the painting evolves, whatever the painting requires, the brushes and the paints respond in that way. Naturally, that means thousands of strokes in one painting. There are no surface layers in the painting.

Thoughts and philosophy, and also dreams take part a bit in the formation of the painting. Only the textures are visible in the painting. This can be a texture of soil. It can be the surface, the skin, the outer look of a living being, or any other object.

Any object existing in the universe can create some products, because the cosmos itself is living, Of course, it is also joyful for me; by adding a bit of my own imagination, I make a joyful trip to the past. And they are reflected as hidden impressions.

We thank the gifted and celebrated painter Ms. Emine Güler, for sharing your art and words with us. May you continue to reflect our collective memories as human beings as well as Turkey’s specialness and beauty.

Thank you, gracious viewers, for joining us on today’s episode of Enlightening Entertainment. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television for Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. May the Divine creativity within guide you toward the Light.