Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 22:09, 16 February 2012

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) No issues specified. Please specify issues, or remove this template. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Kamran Khavarani (born 1941 in Tehran, Iran) is a painter and architect currently residing in Los Angeles, California. He has been credited by UCLA’s art history Professor Albert Boime (1933-2008) – perhaps the foremost social art historian of our time – as the creator of a new artistic movement called Abstract Romanticism. During the last days of his life, in an interview for UCLA Today, Boime expressed that Khavarani is a “one-person movement” representing the new style of Abstract Romanticism.”

Early life

Born into an artistic family, Khavarani started painting at a very young age. When he was twelve years old, he began to study classical painting with the well-known artist Reza Samimi.

Khavarani completed his education in 1966 from Tehran University with a Master’s degree in Architecture and a Ph.D. in Urban Design. His graduate work was done under the guidance of his mentor Master Hooshang Seyhoun, the internationally renowned Iranian authority in art and architecture

Influences

Khavarani’s earlier paintings were influenced by his classical and formal training in arts and architecture. Since his recent encounters with the philosophy of Rumi and other great teachers, both the artist and his art have been transformed and his current paintings carry subtle mystical messages.

Kamran Khavarani’s paintings represent a rare fusion of the philosophical and metaphysical with the aesthetic, and they draw viewers into the inner world. As Professor Boime wrote about Khavarani in his last book, The Birth of Abstract Romanticism: Art for a New Humanity, Rumi and the Paintings of Kamran Khavarani’: “Exalted by the love poems of the Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-73), Khavarani seeks to translate his ecstatic feelings into visual harmonies that celebrate the idea of Presence, the loving, creative side of existence potentially in everything and everyone.”

In The Birth of Abstract Romanticism, Professor Boime explored the details and effects of the artist’s style: “… Khavarani visually expresses his inner response to Rumi, evoking the oceanic and cosmic metaphors of the Persian mystic…Assigning to each of the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) its own unique color register, he gives his primordial visions - most evident in his glowing 'Creation' (2003) - a riveting presence. His skies and seas are saturated in unprecedented, emotional blue-greens, purples and oranges, and his mountain forms are often surrounded by a web of shadowy halos that convey a misty sensory impression of a world still in formation.”

In an open letter on July 28, 2008, Professor Boime wrote: “…Khavarani resurrects the romantic possibility that art can change the world by reaching out unstintingly to the heart and imagination of the individual spectator.” As Professor Boime wrote in the conclusion of The Birth of Abstract Romanticism, “It remains to be seen how the fallout from Khavarani’s painting will influence the history of art. Certainly his work goes against the grain of most international contemporary art and in fact purports to offer an alternative to it…‘Beauty’ is certainly the key word in Khavarani’s lexicon, as it represents the quality he has made it his life’s ambition to express—a harmonizing force to offset the ‘ugliness’ of so much bacchanalian and barbaric display that presently passes for art.”

Technique

Khavarani paints with his hands encased in plastic gloves and by working flatly in oil on paper. He uses his whole hand, in almost dancing motion, and one barely detects the tracks of his labor. As Professor Boime wrote in his book, Khavarani “… has perfected this unique method that produces remarkable results, even at the micro level.”

Awards

Khavarani has won numerous architectural awards such as ‘California Building Official’s highest award of excellence’ for a single family residence, and the design award for the city of Beverly Hills in a commercial category. His “art-scaping” design has been recognized and published in Japan’s most prestigious landscaping magazine for three consecutive years.

External links

• Kamran Khavarani Official Site.
• Professor Albert Boime Official Site.
• The Birth of Abstract Romanticism: Art for a New Humanity, Rumi and the Paintings of Kamran Khavarani.
• The Discovery of a New Style in Art: Abstract Romanticism.

References

1. Soderburg, Wendy. "10 Questions for Albert Boime" , UCLA Today, Los Angeles, October 10th, 2008.

Template:Persondata

• Iranian painters
• Iranian architects
• Living people
• 1941 births