May 4, 2012
Jamshid
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSmlhWJnRN8&feature=youtu.be
“For years my heart asked me for Jamshid’s cup.
That which it held it sought from a stranger.”
– The Green Sea of Heaven, Ghazal 24
“I said, ‘O throne of Jamshid, where is your world-seeing cup?’
It said, ‘Alas, that bright realm sleeps.”
– The Green Sea of Heaven, Ghazal 19
“Wind, tell a secret of my love to that king of beauties,
who among his slaves has a hundred Khusraus and Jamshids,
and if he says , ‘I do not want a poor lover like Hafiz,’
tell him that true kings sit with wandering beggars.”
-The Green Sea of Heaven, Ghazal 23
“O seal of auspicious Jamshid, if your image should, at last,
fall on my ruby bezel, what does it matter?”
– The Green Sea of Heaven, Ghazal 34
Materials and Construction:
First I painted some blues, purples, yellows and reds on to wet watercolor paper and let it dry. Then I chose two places on the painting to draw and cut out two identical circles, and on one side drew a wine glass in black ink and on the other side drew an eye with a globe for an iris in the same black ink. I attached both to a pencil, signifying the one who writes in the book of Heaven. Next, I spun the pencil between both palms first going forwards than backwards. Now the image of the eye seemed to appear in the wine glass.
There is a lot of literal representation present in this piece. When seen as a duality, it appears to be two images, but taken as a compounded whole, they meld into one. Between them sits divinity, represented by the pen that writes out our fate in the book of Heaven, enabling us to unite the two images into one. I play on the idea of changing the way one sees things in order to change the way things are. The cup and the eye are always present, it is simply a matter of uniting the two to see with the heart, which the wine glass represents. I chose the marbled effect for the paper for its aesthetic value but also because the different colors embrace each other so that you do not know where one ends and the other begins, which I find to be an apt symbol for the diversity in the cosmos that we insist on labeling yet cannot always define.