I am Hulya Guler, a Canadian artist based in Ottawa, Ontario.
Born in Turkey, from the time I was able to hold a pen, I was first scribbling, then drawing. Since “artist” was not considered a career choice in the milieu that I was born into, I spent many blissful years unselfconsciously developing my drawing skills for no other reason than to satisfy my desire to reproduce the world around me on a two-dimensional surface. As I got older, science began to fascinate me as well.
I immigrated to Canada at the age of twelve and continued to value science above art, which came easily to me and which I therefore took for granted. My grade-eleven art teacher at Lisgar Collegiate Institute, Mrs. Daphne Dain, changed that. She introduced me to figure drawing, watercolour, oil painting, and sculpture. She showed me that art could be challenging and meaningful, and, for the first time in my life, I considered becoming an artist. But I got scared. Fearing that pursuing art would lead to my ruin, I chose to pursue science.
Soon, I discovered physics, which enchanted me with its purity, elegance, and rigour. For the next twenty-one years, I avoided art. After completing my undergraduate degree at Princeton University, I obtained my Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii, working at the High-Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan. I then did post-doctoral research for close to three years at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. I loved accelerators, particle detectors, and the spirit of collaboration among experimental physicists. I loved sitting in the control room of an experiment in the middle of the night. I loved analyzing data. But my creativity and temperament were not appreciated in the highly corporate subfield of physics that I had chosen. By the time I realized this, it was too late. I felt disillusioned and wanted a change.
From the frying pan, I jumped into the fire. I decided to try my hand at business, which I thought might be more receptive to original thought. After a second disillusionment, this time as a software developer in private industry, I was burnt out. I spent close to a year hiding from the world.
I decided to draw, once again undervaluing art and viewing it as a form of self-therapy to help me become unstuck and able to do other, more important things. But art, which had waited patiently for me while I pursued other avenues, had a surprise in store for me. It felt right. It felt like a glass of cool water after a long run. It was the tender air and the majestic sun. When I had rejected it and belittled it, I had been engaging in denialism. Art was not a pastime or a form of therapy; it was what I was born to do. But I had lost the habit of thinking and working like an artist, and it took me a long time to get it back.
I decided to take a class in figure drawing at a local art centre. When I completed that, I continued drawing the figure at Spring Studio in Manhattan, commuting into New York two or three times a week for a year. I would draw for seven solid hours each time and return with over fifty drawings, most of which would end up in the recycling bin. At Spring Studio, I also worked through Josef Albers’s “Interaction of Color”.
Since, by this time, I was no longer very young, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do and was not interested in following anyone else’s lead. I therefore decided against going to art school. I did, however, believe that I needed training before I could confidently call myself an artist. I rented a studio in Trenton, NJ, and worked with my own models through Kimon Nicolaides’s figure-drawing program outlined in “The Natural Way to Draw”. I gradually returned to watercolour, and then to oil painting. I read profusely about technique, and I looked at a lot of great art in museums.
For a while, I painted traditional portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, but soon, I felt a desire to paint from imagination as I had in my youth. In particular, I wanted to reproduce realistic light and colour effects entirely from memory and imagination, without using any photographic or real-life references. It took years to develop this ability.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I became aware of how much I missed Canada. After an absence of nearly 28 years, I finally returned to Ottawa in 2023.
These days, I mostly paint from memory and imagination in my studio. I strive to create paintings that produce a mental image that will remain vivid long after the viewer has seen the work. I want my paintings to look like things you have seen, scenes that are immediately recognizable to you from your own personal memory, even if we have never met, even if we live in different parts of the world.
I also continue to draw the figure, and I paint landscapes en plein air. If you live in Ottawa, you might see me drawing or painting outdoors. If you do, please don’t say hello, since painting takes focus, and distractions ruin paintings. But you are welcome to send me an email to schedule a personal tour of my studio.
Because of the way I work, my paintings have the quality of getting better the more you look at them. If you own one of my paintings, not only do you have a one-of-a-kind item that was made painstakingly and with love but something that will get better upon each viewing and will, if treated with care, still be here, drawing people in, centuries from now.