gallery arcturus

Review

An Artist Reclaiming The Dance

by Kalli Paakspuu

May, 1999

“Dance is dance.  For me it is about life.  I put the trees upside down which relates to the movement of the dancing.  I put the square ...a little window behind the background...to make a good composition.  Post modernist movement is unfinished work and unfinished images...” says Dara Aram, a painter who wakes up at 6:00am and paints until 6:00pm.

Alive with Aram’s brush strokes and streaked with colours of a floral garden in full bloom, dancers float, spin and arabesque in a central space.  Trees waft in the breeze upside down in a joyful and passionate abandonment of bare feet in gravity.  “People say you have to have inspiration to paint, but most of the time inspiration comes”, says Aram.  Thick swirls of colour fill and cake the canvas with a van Gogh-like energy.  Traditional Kurdish circle dances envelop the ballet form, making Aram’s feminine dancers a resistance movement to the forces that threaten the harmonious cycles of nature.

Around his studio are a number of paintings.  Always female, always barefoot – a homage to the peacemaker in the family.  But why are the trees upside down?  “Putting the trees upside down tells a different story,” Aram says.  He rejoices over the possibility that some people may like to hang the work upside down.

Aram says he paints from his subconscious and likens the process to that of building a house.  “I work mostly from feeling.  But still I am aware of what I do when I paint,” he says.  His works examine how dancers relate to nature.  The breeze in the trees flutters with an animated dance of rainbow acrylic which dries quickly so the original passion and inspiration of the artist does not dissipate.

The dance paintings are an evocation of peace and Aram’s Kurdish origins make him a channel to reclaim the dance in a nation without a folk dance pulse.  Will we listen to and feel what the artists in our midst reveal?