Artist Statement: I call the theme for my design “Persian Garden.” The garden is a prominent theme in the cultural history of my native Iran, appearing in Persian rug designs and tile mosaics of the old cities, as well as in our poetry and songs. My proposed design arranges flower impressions suggesting the movement of a dance around the piano as it makes music. Such imagery has been essential to my creative inspiration, as my first identifications as an artist formed as I made childhood renderings of similar patterns from the World Heritage Site of ancient Persepolis. But I also like to imagine people encountering my design perhaps in a park, along with sunlight or the earth’s scent, and being inspired to dream of their own gardens as in my childhood fantasies while sketching. These experiences can help us become portable gardeners of beauty nearly anywhere we go. As the beloved Persian poet known to the West as Rumi says, this is to “have fallen into the place / where everything is music.”
Artist Aida Izadpanah works in acrylic, mixed media, and fine porcelain. She paints and teaches painting in her Manhattan art studio. Aida has a Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology, and is a former Teaching Assistant at Art Students League of New York (ASL). Aida’s solo exhibitions include Narthex Gallery (NYC) and Seyhoun Gallery (Los Angeles). Group exhibitions include Allied Artists of America, Audubon Artists, and Affordable Art Fair NYC. In 2015, Izadpanah was featured as the cover story in Lines from the League magazine. Fantasy Fountain Fund and ASL awarded Aida a month-long painting fellowship in 2014 at Paris American Academy in France. In 2013 her painting Revelation 26 was selected for distinction among 1,900 submissions by the Chief Curator & Director of Collections of the National 9/11 Memorial Museum. Izadpanah won the 2012 Jeffery Berman Director’s Award in Collage or Mixed Media from Audubon Artists. She is a Women’s Leadership scholarship winner from International House.
