Alter Universe

Fantasy drawings

by Hamid Taghavi
22-Jan-2010
 
I was a doodling kid. In school it paradoxically helped keep my mind focused on the class. Otherwise my mind would drift into a world of mischief. The pages of my notebooks and the blank margins of books were fertile grounds for doodling that next monster, or dinosaurs rampaging through their favorite city, Tokyo, or cartoons of our old, grumpy teacher in a swimsuit flexing his droopy muscles for giggling teen age girls. If other students began circulating the cartoons until one chuckled and got the attention of the poor teacher then very creative explanations had to be made up quickly. Those who remember sleeping on rooftops of Tehran on hot summer nights know what a treat it is to fall asleep with a starry sky as the last thing you see. I had a tiny telescope through which I would look for the spectacular worlds seen through Palomar’s fabled telescope. When no such things were revealed the telescope became a tool to check out the boring lives of the neighbors. Yup. The rumors were true. Mrs. Next Door did use Tide to do her laundry. Fortunately, I had “War of The Worlds”, “White Mountains” and “Chariot of the Gods” and such to feed the delirious imagination. Over time, the doodling intermixed with a fascination with space and what alien landscapes might look like. Humanity may never get to experience those worlds for itself, but there is nothing to keep the imagination from creating its own universe and exploring it. At one point I had the silly notion of taking some classes to actually learn the craft instead of wasting so much good paint. But the world of art must have taken a collective sigh of relief when I came to my senses. And so it has remained a fun side hobby that has incubated in isolation. It so happens that I ended up living within hours of a place that once belonged to another world, Mount Palomar and its magnificent observatory, where I have visited and camped often. There, at nights you fall asleep with the black velvet canvas of the sky and its tapestry of stars as the last thing you see, thanking Cosmos for its delightful ways of time travel.
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more from Hamid Taghavi
 
Anonymouse

This is very nice u can scroll on fotos & see their descriptions

by Anonymouse on


Hamid Taghavi

Anonymouse, Yolanda

by Hamid Taghavi on

Yolanda: Looking forward to your photo essay.  Thanks for reading.

Anonymouse: Thanks for stopping by.  Since I haven't taken any cosmic photos myself I'll offer the ones Hubble has taken. 

//hubblesite.org/gallery/album/

And with any luck Yolanda will top those with her pictures of the Death Valley. 


Anonymouse

Nice. It'd be nice to see some real cosmic photos too.

by Anonymouse on

Everything is sacred.


yolanda

......

by yolanda on

Hi! Hamid,

       Thank you again for your celestial collection, very cool! I sent your artwork to my e-mail at work, which has no memory limit at all and they never delete employees' e-mail either. Please keep writing and painting! Thank you so much for your contributions! I am going camping at Death Valley National Park during Easter Break. If I am brave enough, I will submit an photo essay here. Of course, I have to pass JJ's Quality control and Quality assurance check! :O) I am pretty sure that JJ does not want the low quality photo essays to make IC look bad. I will see what happens.

Thank you for your unique artwork!

yolanda


Hamid Taghavi

Yolanda

by Hamid Taghavi on

All but one of those are safe so check to make sure the second one doesn't short circuit your mailbox.  I'm glad you liked them. 


yolanda

.....

by yolanda on

I like one-point perspective drawings/paintings. I have e-mailed the following to myself:

Crystal cities, outburst, tri-gates #2, and spinners

They are abstract, but beautiful!

Thank you!


Hamid Taghavi

Dear Jeesh Daram

by Hamid Taghavi on

I’m delighted you liked it.  Thank you for the lavish comment.


Hamid Taghavi

Arthimis jan

by Hamid Taghavi on

You are most kind and I wish you the same.


Hamid Taghavi

Dear Bajenaghe Naghi

by Hamid Taghavi on

Thank you for your always kind words.  I would be most interested in an interpretation if you care to come up with one!


Hamid Taghavi

Dear Ari

by Hamid Taghavi on

Excellent analysis and such a wonderfully vivid description.  What would the footprint of advanced, defunct species be like, whether they peaked a billion years in the past or lived a billion galaxies away?  Would their obsession with ever greater monuments in the service of order and sterility doom them?  I’m intrigued by visual perspective’s ability to imply an indeterminate distant future.  When I was a kid myfamily traveled the country by train, and every place the train went through was new and awe-inspiring to the blank page that was my mind.  The railroad tracks went on forever, disappearing in a single focal point which one could never reach, and the endless journey kept on revealing desolate villages, desert landscapes alien to a child, and a permanent sense that there is always something on the horizon waiting to be discovered.

The first three plus number 10 were done before the others.  8 is the most recent. 


Hamid Taghavi

Dear Solo

by Hamid Taghavi on

To compare a twig with that giant Sequoia of an artist only means you are being very generous!  Thank you.


Jeesh Daram

Vast imagination

by Jeesh Daram on

I enjoyed your essay about your art and your thinking as much as the artwork itself. It speaks of a man with a very vivid imagination and limitless potentials. It will channel into greater things as time goes by....good luck.


Arthimis

Hamid Jaan,

by Arthimis on

What an exquisite work ?! I am honestly astonished! Your art is so beautiful... I am speechless on so many of them... Wishing you all the best in life Ham -Meehan, you deserve it...

Respectfully,

Arthemis


bajenaghe naghi

Hamid jan

by bajenaghe naghi on

These are great paintings and I enjoyed looking at them and try to interpret them. 


Ari Siletz

Deep sense of mystery

by Ari Siletz on

We see the handiwork of intelligences who are not around to interrogate. #10, #26, #27 are exceptions where the mystery is also about the far away human figures hopelessly dwarfed by their own constructs.

Like archeologists we reconstruct the stories of these people from what they have built. But unlike archeologists we are not clued by being descendants of these people, deepening the mystery even further.

Who are these people? All we know is that the world they have created is controlled and sterile, nothing is left to spontaneous growth. These people are shaped only by what they create themselves. From our perspective, they have dominated biological nature almost completely, as their vast and massive architectures suggest. But in the process psychological nature has necessarily been compromised. A zero sum game (#27 a wonderful exception).

How do we date these artifacts? Single point perspective in many of the drawings suggest the very far future. The vanishing point in the landscapes draw our speculation to tens of thousands of years. But floating heavy objects take the mind even further out to dreamlike "timelines."

Whoever they are and whenever they lived, these beings are less a society of people than components of an order. In fact, it seems more and more that they are us and it is now, and this is an archeological reconstruction of what paleolithic shamans saw when they glimpsed us in their dreams.

Curious Hamid, were the first three works painted earlier or later than the others?


Flying Solo

Escher

by Flying Solo on

Stand back.

Here comes Taghavi!