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.
I was thinking a lot about the relationship between society and artists recently because of several socio-cultural, geopolitical, and environmental incidents that happened in the last few months in the world. News about environmental habitat loss in Australia, global warming, and political conflicts are devastating and worrisome, and artists are receiving from and contributing to these societies. Here, artists mean creative thinkers and makers, such as designers, writers, painters, gardeners, activists. It is not unrealistic to assume artists are the truth-tellers of the society they live within. The relationship between artists and their environment and how the evolving settings of a place are perceived by artists and change their state of mind engage my mind. These new environmental and geopolitical changes became the reason for revisiting the research I did about six years ago and found out it very interesting and related to this question. This article studies Persian painters, who illustrated the Persian gardens in their paintings (Persian Miniatures) and how these paintings characterize the Persian gardens, which are the reflection of society.
I think this topic never loses its importance since artists always create art, but the arts are impacted. The arts are not just the product of its time but also, more importantly, the valuable source of research about history and culture. They can take us back to understand the other layers of meanings behind the art itself, the artist's intention and message wanted to convey, the structure of the society at the time of art creation, and, more importantly, the artist's state of mind. Was the art created in a time that artist lives in a free and prosperous society or the art created at the time of socio-political pressures such as poverty, censorship, war, and many others? To elaborate more, I like to indicate while Persian Gardens in different eras have a specific geometric layout and buildings (pavilions), water features and planting patterns were the main elements of these gardens. But the details of the garden design such as tile works, a color palette of tiles, tree and plant types, water feature size and shape, building styles, and other details changed and evolved based on the time of creation and the artist's perception of the society. For example, in the Qajar dynasty era, a set of new colors was introduced to the Persian tiles because of the influence of western arts in Iran.
And finally, I am asking the same questions about American gardens and landscape design in the 19th century. I am interested in studying the works of American artists to relate their works with the incidents at the time of creation.
