"Tea & Book Cafe" Book Club

As we embark on the journey into the new year, we all share the desire to set new goals and create a wish list containing our aspirations – from places to visit and people to meet to new skills to learn. Like many, I also confess to having an extensive bucket list akin to the pages of a large book. Each day, as I cross off accomplished items while adding new ones, I recognize that life is a continuous path forward, offering something valuable, even small, at every step.

In early 2O23, inspired by my participation in a book club and a creative writing class led by Moniro Ravanipour, a few friends and I initiated the "Tea & Book Cafe" book club. Ravanipour's motto, "Do things you haven't done, Go ways you haven't gone, See places you haven't seen, Say things you haven't said," always encourages all to have our own group of reading together and read as many books as possible. That advice embraced the idea of reading together and exploring diverse perspectives on a single book. The result? The formation of our book club, where each book becomes a passage to experience different ways of living, diverse characters, new places, and a wealth of knowledge.

Little Things From The Window

It has been a year when we started working from home. As Pandemic has changed many things, a bedroom became my home office and its window that brings me so much to be thankful for. The room became a space where I have spent a lot of my time here than I could have imagined it. Several days passed by, I have faced a new balance in my life. Working on the projects, joining webinars and meetings, waiting for happy hours, experiencing happiness, frustration, and Zoom fatigue, and even interviewing for a new job-- all of these things and many more are now a part of the memory of the window. A consistent frame that I look through every second of a day recognizes the four seasons and tracks the seasonal changes, the growing nature and species, the transforming colors, the emerging sounds, and the flowing scents. All of these seem primitive, and I took them for granted. But now, all of these are the true meaning of hope to me. The hope I have been viewing through a lens of a window and the generosity of nature. Nature shows me hope and a bright future.

One Cube, Different Viewpoints

During this pandemic, as we are working from home, I have been thinking about the idea of home. As the Coronavirus situation challenges our well-being, I became more conscious about how the concept of home is being conceived. I had another blog about home and thought to take action and create something out of clay. With the growing motivation to work with clay after these months because of the temporary closure of the public Clay Open Studio, where I spent time there to make, fire, and glaze clay pieces, I decided to build a new collection to contemplate the concept of home. Here, I imagine a home in a very abstract way as a box -- a cube. An abstract version of a home was formed in this collection. The six images below are a small portion of this collection.

What Is Home?

During this Covid-19 pandemic, I earned free time to finish overdue projects. While I was looking through the photos from our 2018 road trip, I was thinking about the meaning of home. For almost 12 days, a van became our home. The trip started by renting a van, spent 2 nights camp-out in the freezing weather, and continued by visiting a lot of unique places and people.

While imagining these memories in my head, I compared a van home with the stay-at-home order and the contrast between them made me think about “What is home? Or Where is home?”. Home is a subject with a lot of explications without any doubt. The aim of the road trip was to take us from home to places, which couldn’t be home, but the van made us think about each stop as a temporary home.

Painting and Landscape Architecture

Attached to this blog post is the link to my article titled-- “Nazargah”, the main element of Persian garden in the illustration of the gardens in Persian paintings. The article was published in Farsi with an extended English abstract in 2014. The article is a study of gardens and was inspired after taking ”The history of Persian Gardens” in the graduate school in the landscape architecture program. It is the result of one-semester research plus one year of formatting and addressing reviewers’ comments. The extended English abstract and the analysis of Persian miniature paintings in the paper is presented in the original paper. I am thinking of translating the whole article into English once.

This Is The Process: You Break To Make!

These are broken pieces, from which I learned more about clay. A summary of working with clay to create a series of forms. It is easier to draw lines on paper than forming them with clay. Stacking clay lines on each other is hard because they tend to escape from each other. I guess that is the issue with making a free-formed shape. More continuing experiences are coming.

The NYC Trip

We recently came back from a vacation trip to NYC. When walking in the city, it was like flipping my architecture study books--I was turning each page by visiting the buildings and places that I had once studied them. At first, I thought to only put my sketches out to share my experience, but later, I found that it is not enough. I love exploring every corner of the new places when I am visiting. A city like New York is not one place, and its enormous size makes it hard to explore it in a week. So first, I made a list of places we wanted to visit. Using Google Map, we pinpointed all locations on the map and tried to group them based on the proximity of points. For each day, we planned a start point and an endpoint. We checked places in between as we walked toward the endpoint. Adding these places as a point and putting them in a very simple map helped us a lot to cover all the things we have in our mind for this trip. But what cannot be explained here is walking, walking, and a lot of walking....

Our daily routine on this trip includes a lot of walks. Taking the bus, subway, ferry and once a tram ride as well as stopping and seating to take some breath provides me a lot of short stillness moment to observe very carefully and pick my nooks to sketch. Only in a fast pace trip you will appreciate those moments of seating still and looking around. I felt my eyes seeing more details, my ears hearing more sounds, and even the nostalgic sound of the subway train was heard as a rhythmic song.

I love sketching where I go, especially places with different characteristics and sense of place. It seems the hustle and bustle of NYC stole the colors from my sketch. In contrast to my other sketches, in which the peace and quiet of nature encourage you to utilize watercolor and other drawing media. My sketch on this trip was a fast, bold, and clear line works.