By Anand Holla

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. – Salvador Dali

A golden colour pencil in his hand, Emre Suner is leaning over a white sheet of paper on a desk at his Bani Hajer residence. Its tip gently caresses the paper, as if calling upon invisible lines to come alive. When he lifts it, his mother Suham’s braided blonde hair seems to leap out from the frame.

The almost-three-dimensional effect that Suner achieves is remarkable, and yet it happens to be only a means to his end — to draw realistic portraits.

“I’m drawing angel’s wings on my mom,” he says, bubbling with an excitement he can’t hide, “That’s because she’s my love, my angel.”

Suner’s father Emin helps him in preventing her from entering his room. “He wants to gift this portrait on her upcoming birthday,” Emin explains with a chuckle.

Like he does for all his drawings, Suner isn’t settling for a mere reproduction of Suham’s photograph; he is reimagining it to convey his feelings.

“If I didn’t add blood on the wings, or where the wings have broken out from her back, they would have looked artificial. Like plastic wings stuck on her back, you know. That would mean she’s not a real angel,” he reasons, while unloading his sharpener into a tiffin box full of pencil shavings.

It’s ironic that Suner is spending hours to make the imaginary wings look “realistic.” Conversely, it’s perfectly in sync with his fixation for reproducing reality.

“And since her wings broke out from the inside of her back, those wounds started bleeding,” he continues, “The point of this drawing is to show the unseen — The Angel.”

What makes Suner’s art and attention to detail special is that he is only 15 years old and completely self-taught.

If one needs a seal of approval, a quick peek into Suner’s Instagram account (mr_creative), where he posts his drawings to flattering comments, will do. The kid’s got, the last time Community checked, a walloping 128,668 followers on it, across the world.

Suner took to Instagram two years ago. After earning 4,000 followers, his username got hacked last Valentine’s Day. “It was a horrible night. I was inconsolable. My aunt sat me down. She coaxed me into opening a new account, and not give up,” Suner recalls.

Fighting tears, Suner opened “mr_creative” that night and instantly gained 1,000 followers. “That was a tremendous motivation to move on,” he says.

Last summer, Suner began featuring in the Popular Page of Instagram. That helped his page get noticed. By September, he had 100,000 followers.

For Suner, the pre-requisite for putting pencil to paper is that the subject should “inspire” him. “When I find a reference picture, no matter how perfect the picture looks, it should inspire me. Only then can I clearly visualise it on a mental piece of paper and transfer that imagination into reality,” he says.

When Suner doesn’t feel inspired, he can’t draw. “I literally cry out of anger and sadness over how I perhaps won’t be able to ever draw again. It’s a huge problem I have,” he says, grinning.

Like most kids, Suner, a Turkish now settled in Doha, started out drawing sceneries — his first was of a house nestled amidst idyllic greens, a stream and mountains. “I was seven,” he remembers, leafing through his drawing books.

Strewn through those pages are elements of a disjointed narrative of a child artist in the making — page after page of incomplete facial features, average sketches, and of course, a gradual building up of compelling portraiture.

 “Some years back, I would look at them and go: Wow, I can’t believe I’m so good. Now I see and wonder: What was wrong with me?” he laughs.

The transformation was a conscious effort. “One day, in the summer of 2012, I was so bored that I just went into my room, found some reference pictures from Google, and drew them,” Suner recalls.

From that day on, Suner felt the need to keep drawing. “I motivated myself to keep getting better,” he says. “I feel uncomfortable if I don’t keep improving every day. Improving is like learning and we can never afford to stop learning. So the day I will stop improving, I will die as an artist.”

Surprisingly, Suner’s real foray into his forte — portraits — began only six months back. “Portraits are the hardest things to draw on this planet. I spend hours understanding the picture first because without doing that, you can’t draw it right,” he says.

Once he does that, he sketches the main shapes, and first draws the eyes, which leads him to the nose and the mouth. Drawing eyes, especially getting them proportionate, is an awfully difficult task for Suner.

 “Imagine a half-circle you have drawn perfectly with a free hand, and then imagine drawing the other half smaller. This doesn’t give you a perfect circle which leaves you frustrated,” he explains.

Eyes matter the most because they convey the most, Suner feels. “They tell us what the person is feeling at that moment. A good example is Mona Lisa. Leonardo da Vinci secretly added a mysterious smile to her face, and her eyes had such a huge impact on emphasising that smile,” he says.

Knowing well that he can’t control a paint-brush, Suner started off using graphites. Today, though, he is a colour pencil convert. “I fell for colour pencils because of the realism they can help bring,” he says.

Concurrently, on Instagram, he saw a lot of artists using Prismacolor coloured pencils. “I wanted to get them, too, but I couldn’t find them here in Qatar. But I came across Fabre-Castell Polychromos and bought four of them — black, white, pink and green. They were lovely.”

As luck would have it, last December, Suner received a Polychromos pack of 60 as a gift from an Instagram acquaintance, and since then, there’s no stopping him.

Just as his art, Suner’s humility is endearing. Not the one to blow his trumpet, the Class 10 student of English Modern School plays down his Instagram popularity in front of his classmates.

“I don’t know how but the whole school eventually found out about my art on Instagram. Now they follow me and compliment me,” he says.

Suner’s teachers encourage him as well. A few weeks ago, his biology teacher compared him to Da Vinci. “That’s too much. How do I manage to get compared to a legend from the Renaissance Era?” he asks, shaking his head.

A self-confessed introvert, Suner is a total contrast to his “popular” online persona. “Judging by my Instagram activities, people think I am popular. But I just sit alone in class and do my work. I don’t like to talk to people, because I like to focus on what the teacher is teaching,” he says, rather bluntly.

When he’s bored in class, Suner likes to stare at and study people. “Not in a creepy way,” he laughs, “But to try and understand how the shadow is playing out on their face.”

And what about hanging out with friends? “I have two best friends. I don’t need many friends. I prefer to keep things to myself.”

Like all well-raised children, Suner acknowledges his parents’ role in developing his style. “They always supported me with constructive criticism. Their constant encouragement elevated my art. I love them so much,” he says.

Of his three siblings — brother Eren, 16, sister Ezgi, 13, and one-and-a-half month old Emincan — Suner obviously wants to draw the little one first.

“Instead of the Eiffel Tower that I have been drawing for the past two months, I wanted to draw Emincan. But his face wasn’t well-formed then, you know, he looked a little weird then. Now his face is coming through,” he smiles.

It’s tough to pick favourites from Suner’s works, and tougher to describe their peculiarities (see pictures). Be it Guatemala’s national bird, the Resplendent Quetzal, set against a dark evening, or Britney Spears looking sensual in kohl-lined eyes, there’s a visual hook in almost everything Suner draws.

An interesting reimagination, for instance, is a drawing he has named ‘Disgusting Beautiful.’ Suner drew pop singer Katy Perry’s hair and then drew a skull below it. The effect is morbidly striking.

“Her skin is cracking, the skeleton can be seen; it looks disgusting. But her hair, the glitter, and the humming bird drinking nectar from the flower in her hair make it beautiful,” he says.

At first, Suner can only imagine the outline. “But as I keep drawing, my brain explodes with ideas much like a volcano erupting. That is why I get creative as I go along,” he says.

How does he bring out the 3-D effect? “Shadows and shading,” he says, and picks his drawing of a puppy wearing glasses. “Your mind thinks this boundary is like a frame,” he says, referring to the four ends of his portrait, “so I popped the puppy’s glasses out of it to make it seem as if it’s rising off the paper.”

Suner’s partiality to portraits is also because he could draw his favourite people, like Justin Timberlake — he has drawn a dozen of the pop star’s portraits.

The ‘Timberlaker’ explains his obsession. “Justin’s music helped me go through torrid times when I felt low, uninspired to draw. Listening to his music while drawing, made me happy. I could draw more comfortably. Drawing him is my way of thanking him.”

Although he scores mostly A or A+ grades, his parents prefer that he draws for not more than an hour a day. “They feel that it eats into my study time,” Suner says.

And then, he drops the bomb.

“Actually, they are right… I don’t want to be an artist when I grow up,” he says, “I want to be a scientist, or a gynaecologist.”

Thankfully, he is as certain of not giving up art either. He says, “I won’t ever stop drawing though. I want to now start selling my art so I could travel the world and buy my favourite computers.”

It’s a cinch he won’t have trouble finding buyers.

BELOW:

1) BRILLIANCE AT A GLANCE: A random look through Emre Suner’s drawings. Photos by Najeer Feroke

2) Emre drawing the Eiffel Tower in his room.