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Biography: Singing Before The Tower of Bable By Frank Barry The paintings of Guity Novin are steeped in ancient tradition. They whisper to us as the wind whispers by the sea at midnight. In harmony they sing to us as all birds sang before the Tower of Bable. We did not heed them there. Their language we have now all but forgotten, though it returns to us in dreams and passions. The philosophical underpinning of her work is the pantheistic vision of the Sufi mystics, the intense experience of the divine of the human and of human emotion in this cosmos. It is home from which we in the West have long ago strayed. We have built our concrete structures in the wilderness but by night strange fires glow in the distance. Her vision will be familiar to all who feel the inadequacies of the Hellenic paradigm. '`The atoms of Democritus And Newton's Particles of light Are sands upon the Red Sea shore.' Where Israel's tents do shine so bright' (William Blake) Ms. Novin uses the natural colours of her native Persian landscape - the turquoise of the mosques, the bright blue of the skies, the Indian brown of the old clay cities. She paints with materials distilled from the local sulphur and clay and from the blue and black dust dredged from the mines, in continuation of a tradition twenty-five hundred years old. Her techniques too have ancient roots. The influence of the Persian rug makers is obvious, as is that of the craftsmen who construct the mosaics that decorate the mosques. She has adapted to painting the craft of `Khatam' the most famous example of which is the Peacock Throne. In the traditional craft interweaving patterns are made by the painstaking process of arranging and embedding tiny pieces of ivory and coloured stones. Ms. Novin offers a synthesis of these ancient techniques and the influence the School of Paris. Since graduating from the College of decorative Arts in Teheran in 1970 Ms. Novin has given one-artist exhibitions in Iran, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and has participated in several group exhibitions in these countries and in France. Her earliest shows, inspired by the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam, and other Persian poets were `Expression of Silence' at Negar Gallery [1971], and `Posthumous' at Sayhoon Gallery [1973]. In `Song of Dervishes' at Sayhoon Gallery [1975,] she began to explore the realm of Sufism and the Eastern parables, and continued to use these as a vehicle for her art in a 1978 exhibition in Nordeinde Gallery in t... to see complete biography, click on artists name Country: Canada Birthyear: 1944 Galleries: 2001 My BC Period - Traces of a Lost Millenium Place Des Arts, Coquitlam, BC 1998 Painting Shadows over Imaginary Line Guthenham Gallery Granville Island, Vancouver, BC 1997 Dream-reader's Dream Introducing Transpressionism Artex Gallery Ottawa, Ont. 1996 L'important, C'est La Rose Cumberland Town Hall Art Gallery Orleans, Ont. 1995 A Serenade for Clytie Artex Gallery, Ottawa, Ont. 1985 Ecstatic Bonds Durocher Gallery Montreal, Quebec. 1983 Wistful Prophesy Cristopher Hughes Gallery Toronto, Ont. 1982 Rhapsodic Opuses Trillium Gallery Ottawa, Ont. 1981 Meditation Brock Street Gallery Kingston, Ont. 1979 In Essence Didsbury Gallery Manchester, UK 1978 Melodious Spheres Nordiende Gallery The Hague, Netherlands 1975 Songs of Dervishes Saihoon Gallery Teheran, Iran 1973 Posthumous Saihoon Gallery Tehran, Iran 1971 Expression of Silence Nehgar Gallery Tehran, Iran Media: oil Style: other, Transpressionistic Subjects: people, portraits and characters