 Hello everyone and good evening. My name is Taryn Urquhart and I am the Arts and Special Events Programmer here at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. On behalf of the library and the West Vancouver Art Museum, I would like to welcome you to tonight's art talk. While I recognize that we are all in different places this evening, I would like to acknowledge that the West Vancouver Library and Art Museum reside within the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish Nation, Flay-Waututh Nation and Musqueam Nation. We recognize and respect them as nations in this territory, as well as their historic connections to the land and waters around us since time immemorial. I am personally grateful to call the Pacific Northwest my home, and I'm thankful to the Coast Salish communities that continue to protect the natural beauty and animal diversity that surround me every day. It has been my great pleasure to work with Hilary Letwin and her guest tonight to bring this event to your screens. And now I would like to pass things over to Hilary, who's waiting over at the museum. Hilary. Good evening, everyone. I'd like to thank the West Vancouver Memorial Library for partnering with us on this evening's artist talk. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you and to welcome our exhibiting artists, Rosita Monashirazi and Pari Azhar Motamedi, who are both here to talk to us a little bit about our exhibition on currently at the West Vancouver Art Museum under the shade of the lotus tree. This exhibition includes work by both artists and this evening we're looking forward to hearing from them about their artistic journey and about some of the inspirations behind the work currently here on exhibition until April 1. Oh, good evening, Rosita. Good evening, Pari. Thank you so much for joining us. Pari, I'd like to start with a question directed to you. I'd like to learn a little bit more about your life and how we came to West Vancouver and exhibiting your work here at the Art Museum. Hi, Hilary, and thank you so much for organizing this exhibition and organizing this talk. It's been an honor to exhibit with you and to have my work with Rosita's in the same beautiful space. And I really enjoyed the whole process very much. I was born in Iran and grew up in Tehran, entered the Faculty of Fine Arts, Tehran University, the Department of Architecture in 1963. And after graduation from the School of Architecture, we moved with Bansur to London, England, and I started Master's Degree in Urban Transportation Planning. And after two years, we got back and started to work in Iran as an architect and urban transportation planner. By the time the Revolution happened in 1979, we were working in Iran and hoping to be part of the development of the country and to contribute to the well-being and in our professions to do whatever we could. It was cut short and with the start of the war in Iraq, with Iraq, we decided that maybe we should think of leaving Iran because it had become quite dangerous at that time to be in Tehran. They were bombings and various war-related events that were going on. So we came out of Iran in 1982 and I went back to school again in London this time to study urban development planning because I still thought that we would go back to Iran at some point. And urban development seemed to be something that would be a project to focus on and low-income housing was a component of that program. But as the days went by, we realized that we couldn't go back. We had two young sons. And so we applied and got accepted to come as landed immigrants to Canada. And so in 1984, we arrived in Vancouver and at that point there was a big recession here and really no opportunities for work as an architect in the immediate time that we had come. And I was actually very, very depressed because of what was going on in Iran. And while I was really grateful to be here with my family and to have the freedom and the peace of being here, I still had connections with Iran. And so I had become quite depressed actually. And so the only way that I could achieve some normalcy in life and to be able to function was to have this connection with Iran through the art and through painting and poetry. So I immersed myself in poetry, in Chayam's poetry specifically, and I started to paint. And what came out from those first several years was my connection to architecture and to the spaces of Persian gardens, which were very much in my psyche. And those were the spaces that gave me most pleasure when I was there. And so they emerged in my artwork, the geometries, the foliage, the whole architectural space of these gardens. And with Chayam's poetry they came together and they gave me this time or this space to find myself, to find myself as somebody who is displaced but still related to those precious and cherished spaces and still living in the west coast of Canada and enjoying the nature. So it was really a very, very, very enriching and productive time for me. I probably painted, I don't know, 10 hours a day in the middle of the night I would get up and go and immerse myself in the poetry and paint. And so that was the start of this process for me and has continued for 30 years now, more than 30, yeah. The title of our exhibition under the shade of the lotus tree is particularly important because the lotus tree is a place of refuge, a place of solace and parry that certainly applies to the work that we have in our exhibition here with our selection of work by you. Rosita, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about your artistic background and your journey to this point. I think we, Iranians are sharing similar stories, but before that I would like to thank you for this opportunity and this beautiful exhibition in this very cultured environment. I also have to mention that I am honored to be with these two women, Peri and you, so smart, kind, passionate and courageous. This is truly my honor to be part of this exhibition and getting to know you in this journey. I grew up in a very peaceful environment in a city close to Tehran, a garage with a wonderful climate, nice rivers and beautiful nature, and when I was in grade two I realized that I like colors and I like to be a decorator or an artist. But the idea was very vague, but when I finished middle school, I entered graphic art school and right after I graduated from high school, all universities were closed because it was two years after the revolution. And the government closed all the universities due to cultural revolution, to change all the textbooks and fired all intellectual and elite profs and so on. The university was closed and as Peri mentioned, war happened one year after the revolution, and also the government started to execute and imprison the oppositions. So the country was under war, the situation was really dark, political, social environment was very, very dark and also there was no university for me to go. I decided to, I made my parents to accept and sending me abroad. I moved to Germany and I started university after I learned English in German language in Goethe Institute. I studied communication design there. And then I met my husband who was my roommate at that time. So I decided to move to a country that is more, have more acceptance for multiculturalism, and we decided to come to Canada. I left Iran in 1984, and I moved to Canada in 1990 with my husband and the little son. Here I learned the language again and studied at Emily Carr University. First Langara, I got the diploma and then transferred to Emily Carr University. When I finished university in 2003, we moved back to Iran because I came to abroad just because I wanted to study and go back to my country. So the idea was always with me, so I wanted to go back. And I moved to Iran in 2003 and stayed there until 2006. Here I met so many wonderful people, artists and educators, and I had the opportunity of study illustration. I got my masters of illustration in Iran, and I think the country is really rich in that it has over 5000 years of history of illustration. Art on clay, illustrating life of people on clay, carpet, you name it, and books and scripts. So I think I was very fortunate to have the opportunity of study in Iran. And when I moved back and along the way, actually, I have always been teaching, teaching art. And when I moved back and seriously started to teach, I realized students, usually art students quit after they graduate. After a few years of struggling, they quit. So that became something very important to me and I wanted to study further and get an answer from my question. And I applied for a PhD program at the University of Victoria. I was about to finish when I got ill, seriously ill, and I decided to quit because I couldn't finish my thesis. I was about to be done, but all this theory became kind of meaningless at that point when I was very ill and in pain all the time. But my wonderful, wonderful supervisor, Michael Emi, Dr. Michael Emi, didn't allow me to do that. And actually he taught me a lesson how to not quit. So actually in a practical way, actually. And he organized a program and they offered me the masters of art education from the University of Victoria. And also I've been teaching at Emily Carr University since 2009. When they started the program of illustration, they invited me to teach there. And since then I've been teaching, working and being involved with their programs. Thank you so much, Rosita. It's such a pleasure to work with you and sorry for this project. I'd like to talk a little bit about poetry. You both have touched a little bit on the importance of it in your work. And it's certainly very present in our project. And it gives me much pleasure to see I'm looking out at the gallery right now and I can see all of our label texts, not just in English but also in Farsi and we've included the poems that have informed your work. Pari, you mentioned that you were seeking solace in poetry when you first came to Canada and that that was infusing itself into your work. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the poetry that we have included here in the exhibition and how on a practical level it influences you. Are you taking poems and illustrating them in your mind or is there a slightly different process going on? Pari, do you want to speak to that first? Yes. Well, thank you for that excellent question. Poetry is such a big part of the Persian psyche. Everybody recites poetry. It's a way of communication between scholars and between everyday people. In families, people would have quotations of poetry if they want to convey something that deeply affects them. And we have all these poets from a thousand years ago who have given us this wonderful heritage. So it was, for me, there was no, it wasn't something that I decided to do, but it was something that was part of me. And Khayyam was such a big part of my family's tradition. And my father always had a khayyam, a worn out little book that I took with me, and the lessons of life were there. My father was not a religious person at all. And Khayyam was his intellectual and spiritual place. And so that was why I started with Khayyam. And it wasn't really at all the surface or the words of the poem that inspired me. It was the mood of the poems, the way he speaks of nature and being in the moment and enjoying what you have. And not to dwell so much on the things that you don't know and that are beyond you, but to be here and present and connect to that beauty. And so it was for me, for me it was the gardens. And I had suddenly come into this city, which is a garden, a beautiful, huge garden. The ponds that were in the small Persian gardens is now the Pacific Ocean and the trees, everything. So for me it was really immersing in these two worlds and bringing them together that was really inspiring and motivating me to do this work. Then in one of our trips to Iran, I picked up a book by a poet who I didn't really know that much, a contemporary poet who is now in his late 80s and is still living. And he is Shafi'i Katkani, Muhammad Reza Shafi'i Katkani. And I brought his collections of poetry to Vancouver and started to read this poetry and realize how he has these layers of meaning in these words. And the more I read, the more I understand what is going on. And it was a very, very different experience because with his poetry, I had lived in the time that he is talking about. And I can read into his poems what I had lived, which was different from Qayyam's poetry for me. So I started to paint his work. And after I had done about 10 or 11 paintings, one day I told Mansur, my husband, who used to travel to Iran at that time. I said, you know, this poet doesn't know I exist in this world. And I'm always immersed in his work. Is it possible for you to find him and show him? Because I feel terrible about painting these poems without him knowing that I'm doing this. So he took these paintings on a disk to Iran and with the translation of the poems in English, because I had started to translate them into English because I wanted to really understand them and putting them into a different language for me was part of the process of painting them, really. So Mansur went back and met him through a mutual friend who was a publisher. And he immediately was so supportive of this work. He wrote a letter saying that you can translate all of my work into English and into paintings. And very soon after that, about a year after that, I was still in the process. I had painted some paintings and translated. And he suggested that we publish this work in Tehran, which was for me very too early, really. But they were in such a hurry to publish the paintings with the translations. And he suggested, of course, that I find a poet who is also conversant in Farsi and English and to ask him to edit my work. So he suggested that I connect with an English poet who has translated half his and very well known. He has a Persian wife. Do you remember his name? No? I can't. Anyway, he said I have no time. And then in a conference in Vancouver, we were talking with Rosita. And I was saying that I have to find an editor for this work, an English-speaking editor. And suddenly, the speaker who had just spoken about his translation of Rumi's poetry was standing behind me. And he said to me, you know, I can edit your English translations. And I looked at him and I said, well, thank you so much. But how do you know what I have done or what I am doing? So he said, this is Alan Williams now. He said, because Shafiq Adkani was my Persian teacher at Oxford University 35 years ago. So that was just the godsend. And he wrote a letter to Shafiq Adkani, which I took back. And so that was how that part of the work continued. And he became the editor and the book was published. And it got an award in translation a few years afterwards. And then I have been painting his work for about all these years. I mean, I have probably painted about just less than a hundred of his poems. And then, of course, I moved into translating and working on the work of Sohrabes-e-Pehri and Mehdi Akhaban-e-Sohles, whose work is presented behind you, my interpretation of one of his important poems. And, you know, I have been extremely, extremely lucky to have this, really this treasury of thinkers and poets who have given us so much. And I could live many lifetimes and work with these and still have more inspiration and more work to do. So it's just been an amazing opportunity to work with these poets. It's wonderful to hear how this process of translation has really permeated your visual process. You're not just translating the verses. And I loved what you said about how translating the poems into English gave you a deeper understanding of the poetry. Rosita, I'd like to speak also about your incorporation of poetry and it acting as an inspiration for your work. The main series of works that we have that we're exhibiting by you are, of course, based on a very important poem, The Seven Valleys. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you worked with this poetry, how it is similar to the way Pahri has in her work and how perhaps it's a little bit different as well. Obviously each individual have a specific ways of connecting with poetry because it's very, very personal and especially because it contains lots of metaphors and it goes back to the history of the life of each individual and their observation from the poetry. It changes the meaning completely sometimes, but the part that my father was also in love with Hayyam is very similar to Pahri's. I remember in 1986 when my father visited me in Germany and I was complaining and, you know, talking about being alone and so on. And it was the time that Muhammad Reza Shajarian had a cassette game out at that time. He actually recited poetry of Hayyam. My dad played the music and said, look, we live in a moment in this moment. Don't think about tomorrow. Let's enjoy the time together. And so poetry in my family was part of our ritual. My mom also writes poetry and they've been involved with it a lot and obviously as a child, as an oldest child, I have been always influenced by a Persian poetry in our household. But later on, when I started to read poetry myself, the idea of self-absorbent and also the metaphor actually haunted me the most. So I was so inspired by finding the meaning behind chains of words. For several years when I was younger, I couldn't get it at all. But the mystery actually really made me look for the magic of using literature in Persian poetry. And along the way, when I was involved with painting and reading different books and learned about conceptual art, I found out that these are completely conceptual. However, they belong to the time prior to conceptual art. Long before conceptual art came along in the West and so I learned how to combine them and find meaning through my own life in relation to the poetry that I have been reading all the years. And the pieces that affect me the most turned into visual form slowly. I think they have the poem by Hafez within me with this shattered heart. That's the time that I was super depressed and it was after 2009, the uprising in Iran, and I felt like I'm away so I can't do anything. I thought I have to stop painting forever because there is no reason for me to paint anymore since it has no use. So once I started to make some lines and this poem came to my mind and I realized this is it. You know, you don't go for the poetry, it comes to you because it's so, you know, I think it's in our DNA somehow as Iranian, even now there's slogans that, you know, always they have a form of poetry, they rhyme, you know. So, from that time, poetry became more, not effectively but consciously came to my work. And at the work, I just work with it, the story of Seymour. And it's the story that came to me right after I came back from Iran after four months being there, knowing so many wonderful people learned new techniques and also meeting so many young souls that they were struggling daily, you know, without feeling that they are intellectual or they are fighting for freedom, you know, in their daily lives. They scream for freedom. And when they came back, this poetry actually became so meaningful to me, like the story of rebirth. And so I started to visualize what it looked like if all these birds become free. I was also wondering how in this dark time, all these glitters and bright colors come to my canvas while I'm in tears, listening to news from Iran. So, and I think the idea of rebirth and the truth in the poetry of Attar actually made me work this way. So I'd like to talk a little bit more, Rosita, about the technique that you employ in the work, much of the work that we have exhibited. You've used reverse glass technique. And as you mentioned previously, you were in Iran for four months in the middle of 2022, you were there for the summer months. And I'd like to hear just a little bit about the technicality of how you do reverse glass painting. It's not straightforward and something that I'd love our viewers and our visitors to understand a little bit better. Can you explain how reverse glass technique works? Sure. Actually, when I traveled to Iran, I had a Tehran tour, and I visited old houses with a wonderful design windows. The part of it was covered with paintings, and the style was reverse glass painting. At that time, my plan was to learn traditional mirror work, which I learned. But it's, you know, the corner of my mind, you know, I was so inspired by those paintings. Before I learned glass work, I felt like I need to incorporate glass with mirror work. So, and sometimes I need color for my glasses. So, and how can I do that? I accidentally come across a wonderful master, his name is Mohsen Bani Asadi, who is one of the leaders of the Museum of Reverse Glass Painting. And I contacted him and he generously offered me to teach me how to work with this technique. And he is the curator of a gallery in Tehran. And after gallery was closed every day, so I visited him there and he taught me different techniques. How the technique works. You pick a piece of glass, usually two mils or three millimeters, not so thin because it breaks very easily. And clean the glass and then use rapidograph, which is a technical pen which I have right here right beside me. It has a really, really thin point. It looks like a needle, very, very thin, 0.10, 0.15, it's very thin. You clean the glass and then have your drawing ready on a piece of paper. You overlap the glass on top of the paper and start outlining your drawing. So this is very thin, but the traditional way of working with glass is different. They used very thin brushes. Thin brushes are hard to use and also at the same time easy to use because it has some sort of thickness and it will create a nice border between different colors. Whereas these thin pens, they have no borders basically. You have to be very careful when you want to create borders and margins between the two colors. And sometimes I pass the border and I had to clean my glass with needle to clean the parts of the main mistake. After you finish the outlining, you have to cover your glass with oil and some sort of varnishing oil and oil thinner. Leave it for a few days to get dry and make your lines secure. And then you start using powder paints, which you can see them in here, or oil paint. But I added a glitter mixed with oil. The magic of this painting for me is you work in reverse. For example, if you want to make wrinkles for your character, first you do the wrinkles. And then you want to create blush. You do blushes. And then you put the skin tone. It was very difficult for me to reverse all my training and start from the details first. And also the problem is if you make mistakes or you change your mind, there is no way to go back to it. And then you leave it for a while to get dry and after a month you cover the whole thing for the background with white paint and secure the whole painting. It's a very painstaking process and quite extraordinary. And I should think so interesting as you say to reverse your training and to build the surface first and work backwards. They're beautiful works. Harri, we've had a number of visitors ask about your practical techniques as well. You work in watercolor. And the piece that is behind me actually, the City of Stones, is very large and I'd like to hear a little bit about how you work in watercolor. And building up your layers, you had previously said that the blue sky and the work behind me was an incredibly difficult, consistent tone to achieve. Can you talk a little bit about your watercolor process? Yes. Thank you, Hilary. Yes, it's, I really enjoy working with watercolors. I have tried at different times to work with the other media, oil and acrylic and it never gave me the pleasure of working with watercolor. And what is really for me interesting and exciting to work with watercolor is that it's a medium where you can have a certain amount of control. But also there is a lot of accidents that happen and it's always wonderful to be able to work with these accidents and to accept them as a part of this happening on paper and see what can come out. So it's always like a voyage, like a thing that you are going through at the moment that you are working with this medium. There is very little, of course there is some planning and control ahead of time. But the actual moment of painting is the most important part that giving into this medium and see play with it all the time to see what you can achieve with this. In the beginning when I worked with smaller pieces, of course, it was different. It was more possible to work with this medium and there was a lot more control in them. There's a lot more specific geometries that are happening. But as I started to work in bigger pieces, which I loved when I started to do this, it became really, really challenging but also very, very exciting. So with watercolor you have to work on a flat surface. So you have to have these large pieces of very thick watercolor paper, which I do stretch. I soak it in water and stretch and tape it to my board so that it's completely flat at all the moments of painting. And then I start to work with the colors and my first moment is actually to do the outline. The architecture of the piece is what I do in pencil. But a lot of the things that you see is actually happening without any pre-thought and without any pencil. So for example in the background, the painting in your background, all of the form of the tree which I have there, the lotus tree, is actually my brush. And I use for that specific part of the painting acrylic ink and spontaneous because I can't really draw those lines in paint and try to follow the line because then it will become a very weak line if I want to do that. But when I just play with that, it becomes much, much more spontaneous to work with those. And then comes the time to put the paint on. Somehow from the very, very first paintings I did to today, the very first color that I have used in these paintings is blue. Different shades of blue, turquoise blue, the blue that you have in the painting at the back. And usually they are different blues that come together. And if I want to repeat the blue, I have to be very careful about what I am doing, how am I combining these blues. And sometimes it becomes quite challenging to remember what did I do, how did I get this blue. And then on top of that, it's the layering, which is also very interesting because with the layering you never really know what color will come out in the end. And you have to be, you have to just be courageous and go with it and see what happens. And so, you know, with the layering it becomes much more exciting. You have a very, very large palette really that you are creating as you go along. And a lot of people have asked me about the very precise lines in these paintings which come from my background in architecture. And somehow, even if I want to do a really free, free work, it's always, in the end, there's always this architecture, this geometry. And it has two parts for me. It sort of anchors the work and also geometry is always, for me, something that relates to infinity and to the ideas of limitlessness. Because you can take a square and then grow it from both sides so that it can go to infinity and it can go inside itself, you know, by just posing these squares on top of each other. So there is always the idea of something beyond the painting. I achieve that through the geometries. For example, in the work behind you, there is this idea of something going on beyond this image if you look at it. And of course, I use, I do not use any spray painting or anything. It's always working with brushes and watercolor and water. But I do use the architectural, the T square, which has an edge. So it's sitting above the paper. And I wet the area that I want to work with, either with water or with paint. And then I go with a very fine brush, but guided with the T square so that it becomes a line. But it doesn't stay as a line because it's wet on the other side. And so it becomes a graduated color. And so that's, I mean, with watercolor, there are so many things that you can experiment with and discover as you work. It's always like being in a class or in a, but you are the medium is actually your teacher, the medium and the paper and the accidents that happen. Teach you, this is how it happens. And this is how you can continue learning. Thank you for that explanation, Pari. As I say, a number of our visitors have been very curious about the techniques behind the work in the exhibition. I think this is probably a really good place to conclude our conversation this evening as much as I would love to keep talking. I know there's so much more that we could say. I'd like to thank you both for joining us this evening and talking about your work. We are very excited to have produced a publication for this project, which has, which has me, excuse me, which has two essays, one by Hussain Aminot about Pari's work and one by Astri Wright about Rosita's work. And that is of course available for purchase here at the Art Museum, along with Pari's publication about which we spoke earlier we have copies of that available to purchase as well. So if you would invite viewers, if you have not yet come in to see the work in our exhibition under the shade of the lotus tree, please join us for open Tuesday to Saturdays from 11 until five. And this exhibition is on until April 1. Thank you very much and have a nice evening. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Larry. Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks.