the new visual culture

My dad brought me these awesome inks from india; basically, it's powder that i mix with water and i get this really saturated rich amazing color out of it.  i've been working on some stuff lately (without the paint) trying to get my ideas together to make something bigger and better combining all of my different ideas.  here are two ink drawings i worked on over the last week.  i really want to get better at my farsi calligraphy, which is hard since i dont know how to read or write in farsi, so basically i look off an already written text.  the first drawing, the text is actually in arabic, and the poem on the top, it's a poem by Mahmoud Darwish called, "Another Day Will Come."  He's awesome, and the book I have by him, "The Butterfly's Burden," is absolutely beautiful and filled with amazing poems.  One the left side, in english, and on the right, in arabic.  I wish so badly that I could read them in their original text.  one day, maybe.  the second one, it's a poem by Sohrab Sepehri that my mom wrote out for me.  It's a poem about two young lovers who go to an apple orchard one day and the boy picks and apple for the girl, but right as he does the owner of the orchard walks over and yells at him, causing the girl to drop her apple.  At the end of the poem, the narrator says that to this day, he wishes he had his own apple orchard so that the girl would not have had to drop the apple.  its so much more beautiful in farsi i wish i had memorized it...

in any case, just some ideas I've been working on...really, it started with some random doodles here and there and somehow even when i was doodling women in scarves always translated into my drawings.  because more and more i'm becoming more interested in women's rights and issues in iran and other middle eastern countries and it's something thats always in my head...so even without thinking about it consciously, it comes out in my sketches, and such.

i'm going to try to expand on certain things and what i really want is to get a large poster board and to magnify all of these things and THEN i'll paint them....these ones i really did without thinking about color, so it's really been hard for me to decide which colors i want for which parts.  hopefully i'll have a better idea when the time comes :)  stay tuned...