The bureaucrats, warmongers, and fascists of our world will never diminish beauty or the creative heralds who broadcast it every day through their art.
Zahra Marwan is a prolific and luminous exemplar of that truth. The Kuwaiti immigrant populates her hundreds of dreamlike watercolors with fish, birds, dogs, bugs, people and places, Arabic calligraphy, prayer beads, and stars. Her pieces tell stories of her family and of her childhood in the Persian Gulf and her new life in New Mexico.
Thirteen new paintings hang at Hecho a Mano in the exhibition Zahra Marwan: Is There a Horse on Your Roof? opening July 3. The show is named after a story in Maurice Sendak’s 1956 children’s picture book, Kenny’s Window.
Marwan’s watercolors look like stories — whimsical, nonlinear stories — and the descriptions accompanying many of them are more like stream of consciousness or poetry than traditional titles of paintings.
Check out The West Mesa Pool and Angela’s open heart. Darwaza, an open door, a library. This painting contains a depiction of the doorway of Santa Fe’s original historic public library visible on Washington Avenue on the east side of the New Mexico History Museum.
”There’s a word Darwaza, which can be good or bad,” the artist says. “It means you’re an open door, you’re generous, you’re kind, you’re loving, and in recent years, I’ve associated it with libraries. The other implication of Darwaza I grew up hearing sometimes negatively, is leaving the door open, a sort of invasion on privacy in a very private culture like Kuwait.”
The “Angela” in the title is a woman Marwan sees on weekday mornings at the pool and who, she says, “greets me with so much warmth and kindness and heart.”
What about the little stars with legs running along a distant hilltop in the painting, and a man riding two horses on the hill? “The man with the horses is running across the landscape, in a sense like the circus or joy of things. I think the running stars, too, how they fill the sky yet are somehow among us.”