Şahinde Ermiş never took a single art lesson. She learned to paint at her kitchen table by watching Bob Ross reruns on television — and 22 years later, she has 80 canvases to show for it.

  • 81 years old
  • 22 years of painting, entirely self-taught
  • 80 original works completed
  • 2 solo exhibitions, the second opening this month

Learning from a TV painter, alone

Ermiş lives in the village of Alancık, in the Zonguldak province on Turkey's Black Sea coast. She raised four children alone after losing her husband young, and it was only once they were grown that she went looking for something new to occupy her time.

What she found was Bob Ross, the American painter whose soft-spoken PBS series taught a generation of viewers to paint "happy little trees" without ever leaving their living rooms. Ermiş had no art school, no local class, and no teacher other than her television screen. She studied his brush technique, copied his methods for blending sky and treeline, and then began applying them to her own subjects: the hills, orchards and red-roofed houses of the village she has lived in for decades, according to local reporting from Tempo Gazetesi.

A studio on the balcony

Ermiş paints most days from the balcony of her home, working from postcards, remembered landscapes, and views she can see from where she sits. Between painting sessions, she tends her garden and works on puzzles — but it's the easel that holds her full attention.

"When I sit down in front of the canvas, I forget the rest of the world," Ermiş has said of her painting sessions, describing how completely the work absorbs her.

One recurring subject in her work is especially personal: old houses from her village that no longer exist. Rather than let them disappear from memory entirely, Ermiş has made repainting them from recollection one of her favorite projects — turning her canvases into a kind of visual record of a landscape that is otherwise only preserved in the memories of the people who once lived there.

A second exhibition at 81

Ermiş held her first exhibition in 2006, not long after she'd built up an initial body of 44 paintings. Two decades on, with her collection now standing at 80 pieces, she is preparing to show again — this time at the Zonguldak Fine Arts Gallery, with an exhibition running September 15–17, according to Odak Gazetesi.

Local coverage of Ermiş has spread well beyond Zonguldak in the past week, with several regional Turkish outlets picking up her story as an example of what's possible for anyone willing to start something new later in life — no formal training required, just a television, an easel, and enough patience to keep going.

At 81, she shows no sign of slowing down. She is already counting down the days to her second show, still treating each new landscape as a chance to lose herself in color for a few hours — proof that a hobby picked up in the second half of life can become a genuine body of work, one brushstroke borrowed from a television painter at a time.

Ermiş says she still relies on the same method she started with two decades ago: studying a postcard or a remembered view, then building up the scene layer by layer exactly the way she once watched it done on screen. She has never used a projector, a grid, or any digital shortcut — just patience, a palette, and whatever daylight her balcony gets that morning. For a woman who spent decades raising a family before she ever picked up a brush, that self-taught discipline is arguably the most striking part of the story.