A Woman Defined

This new gallery in Laguna wants to move you emotionally and stay away from the ho-hum.Painter and poet Mahvash Mossaed and award-winning producer and photographer Dennis Roberts moved their gallery to Laguna Beach to shake things up. Leaving their Santa Ana location on Main Street after five years, Mossaed and Roberts took the dark brown walls of their gallery space at 1294-D S. Coast Highway and painted them white to enhance the bright light of the ocean and the energy of Laguna.Demossa Gallery is exhibiting the work of graduates of the Laguna College of Art and Design’s Master of Fine Arts program, but it will also show the work of Mossaed, who left her home country of Iran when she was 18. As she is personally interested in naïve primitive, art brute and folk art, Mossaed wants art to affect the emotional side of the brain.Open in Laguna for three months, Demossa Gallery will celebrate with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. today for the First Thursday Artwalk.We sat down with Mossaed to find out what makes Demossa Gallery tick.

Q. Why did you choose Laguna?
A. Where else is better than Laguna? I live in Irvine and I would always come and visit my friends, but just being here is absolutely wonderful. The people are so wonderful and so friendly and so kind to us, so welcoming. It’s just like a different world here. We can see people and exchange the energy that they have. I always love to go to Europe because of the exchange of energy. You can leave home and you just walk on the street and you see people are smiling. The water and everything just lifts your spirit. I love it here.

Q. What do you do as a gallery to set yourself apart from all the others in Laguna?
A. I’m a very passionate person and I’m also a dreamer. I’m also very determined and very hard-working. I know that no masterpiece was made by a lazy artist, and they say that Rome wasn’t built in one day. There are a lot of galleries, and a lot of them are showing waves, and seascape and all of those things. I want to swim against these waves. I want to bring something new. Since I’m very emotional and passionate, when I go to an exhibition I want the painting to move me. It’s like when you go see a movie and you come home and for days you are dazed and carrying the story with you. I think the role of painting is the same. For me, the job of art is to move me. What I’m hoping is that I can show a type of emotional, personal, hard-edged art, things that are not necessarily impersonal and polite. I hope the artists who have that kind of art approach me. Because I don’t want to go to L.A. or New York to find that type of art.

Q. Do you have those kinds of artists coming to you easily?
A. I want them to come to me. By showing that type of art, I want them to know that I’m here, that I’m open. I want to show more emotional work.

Q. What is in store for the future? A. We want to be an exciting gallery. We don’t want to be nice and clean. Every piece that I put on the wall, I have to be emotionally attached to it and I have to be passionate and excited. If I don’t feel that, I’m not going to hang it. I’m a poet, and in the future I would like to have poetry reading here. There’s a photographer that has traveled all over the world and he wants to present the photographs and the food and music from the certain place that he has photographed. I just want to be unpredictable. Like a good marriage, there always has to be an element of surprise. If you draw a circle, I want to step out of it.

Q. What do you strive to achieve through your artwork?
A. I play my own song and I paint my own life story. I only paint for myself, to please me. Whatever phase I’m going through as a woman. It’s all about my story as a woman, how I came from Iran and made myself who I am. It’s all about a woman’s emotions and what I’m going through – it’s a self-discovery. My purpose is to show my art and also show the other artists’ art that has touched me. Our purpose isn’t filling up our pocket. It’s being touched by the art that I show, and as a result, being able to touch others.

Bijan
Designer

Dear Mahvash,I have great pride in having your artwork in my private atelier at my corporate penthouse headquarters, as well as in my home. The enjoyment I get from your wonderful use of color, exciting subjects, and especially the way you see life through your own eyes is fascinating. As a designer not everyone loves what I do! But I have been doing it for the last twenty years, because I love it and I am proud of my success!You should be happy, strong and confident with your taste and I wish I could have the pleasure of owning many, many more pieces from your collection! Each piece shows strength, daringness, love, and hatred, laughter, tears… very, very much everything.Bravo!!Warmest personal regards,

The Lancet Oncology Media Watch MagazineThe exhibition interleaves themes of remembrance, desire, anatomy and radiology, and the essential testamentary nature of these ideas is what binds the emotional and scientific scraps of Mossaed’s mixed-media constructions. If the artifacts of memory – snapshots and pressed flowers- invoked the presence of the now bygone , then in a way, orthographic marks of the imaging sciences – CT and MRI scans – witness the uniqueness of a patient’s physiology. Nostalgia, loss, physics, and oncology come together to testify to the presence of a body at a particular emotional and physiological juncture.Article in “The Lancet Oncology” written by Dr. Jeffery Kuo, OncologistStandardMahvash makes use of every color on her palette, all depending, it would seem, on her momentary mood. In fact, it is the passionate and the poetic that is most often evident in her art. Her paintings are remarkably honest too, displaying the pleasantness and positiveness that is typical of the artist herself.

Weekly ReviewShe reveals a playful spirit and a tutored talent for combining joy and naïveté with controlled, well-disciplined creativity. Her work is warm, intimate and exceedingly personal. She finds inspiration in human relations, in fantasy, myth, and even dream creation, and yet she finds equal delight as a painter in fastidious concern for color, composition, and finding a perfect balance between restful harmony and decisive dynamism.

The OregonianIranian women, as every fan of stereotypes knows, are male-dominated, chador-clad and decidedly unliberated. Believe this and you will miss everything exciting about Mahvash Mossaed; an Iranian born woman whose paintings are exhibited at various galleries. There’s unmistakable warmth that shines through her paintings. They glow with color and emotion. They leap back and forth from the resonance of an early Matisse to a Persian variant on a Judaic legend.

Chicago TribuneAt the heart of the show are paintings by Mahvash, an Iranian born painter and poetess, whose work shines with strong bright colors and filigree designs that sometimes spill over from the canvas to the frame.

Artesian
Magazine of upwelling art and creativityMahvash’s paintings are imaginative in design and conception. The aesthetic simplicity of its style identifies with a timelessness that is universal.

Interior designMahvash’s paintings range from expressionistic selection of forms and colors to multicolored folk pieces. Her work denotes an impressive talent and an ability to create a direct and intimate relationship with her viewer.

Willamette weekMahvash has been praised for her use of color and her vitality and humor. Her paintings are surreal in nature, autobiographical, and full of rhythm and texture.

The Vancouver SunIn Mahvash’s paintings one can view an arresting mixture of real and unreal. If we were to take her people and objects at their face value, they appear familiar: cats, doves, fruit, flowers, men, and women. But these are the very same things that are allegorical too, where meaning may seem alien to those who do not inhabit the artist’s particular world.

Sheridan SansegundoMahvash’s paintings are “primitive”, a term which derives from primitive cultures, and an almost-obsessive focus upon detail. This approach draws more upon the artist’s inner feelings, which in turn creates a seemingly naïve approach to spatial relationships and accepted drawing techniques. Primitive definitely, but behind her images is a highly developed concept. In this exhibition she has brought together a cohesive body of work, which expresses the importance of primitive art in today’s society.

 Irvine world newsMahvash’s work has to do with women and women’s issues. She paints everyday life, things that affect her, one day happy, one day mad. Her work is “dreamlike” and “spiritual.” Her expression of a little girl within, comes out in her painting “little girl found,” in which all her selves, young, present, and the future older women she will become are united.

The American Visionary Art Museum
HolyH2O: Fluid Universe exhibition.
October 2, 2004 to September 4, 2005.Lifetimes
… A painting that captures our everyday immersion in water is Mahvash Mossaed’s “Woman in Shower,” which depicts a woman’s body completely involved in this daily … 

Painted Dreams Book ReviewsJames A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book ReviewMy Painted Dreams is a unique and impressive blend of art and poetry by Mahvash Mossaed, a female Iranian-American. The monochromatic yet powerful images add power to the simple, fluid free verse of life, death, spiritual essence and the quest to find meaning in life. A profound, evocative, and wondrous book, and a “must” for true devotees of insightful poetry. The Poets: The poets stand in the rain,/They wear no raincoats./They have no umbrellas./They are discussing the shadow of a shadow of a shadow.//But their poetry is already soaking wet–/They have not developed their reality muscles/So they walk with a limp while admiring the color of a vein in a leaf. 

SMALL PRESS BOOK REVIEW
Henry BerryMossaed is a woman from Iran who has lived in Canada, Africa, and Europe with her husband who is an architect for the United Nations. Her paintings and poems are broadly humanistic with a special appeal for women with their tenderness, hopefulness, and changeable sense of identity. Her paintings, many of women with distorted but not grotesque shape, and her poems on subjects such as beauty, home, aging, and youth, some of which include musings about God, have a dreamy quality going along with the breadth of Mossaed’s background, the humanness of her femininity, and the universality of her feelings and view. The paintings shown in the book are in shades of brown, the color of the text and cover also. Several full-color gift cards accompanying the review copy better convey the richness and distinctiveness of Mossaed’s painting. Information on the book, the full-color cards, and exhibitions of her artwork in the U. S. and other countries can be obtained by contacting her at her address or email given in the heading of this review.

ASIAN ART NEWSMy Painted Dreams, a stirring collection of art and poetry by Mahvash Mossaed, uncovers one woman’s lifelong search for spiritual fulfillment in an often cold and indifferent world. The journey is at times an agonizingly solitary one. She searches for both answers and comfort from the people and the socially inflicted roles. One feels like a trusted guest invited into Mahvash’s vulnerable interior world to partake in a soul’s trying, but ultimately rewarding migration.We emerge from this book in much the same way: renewed, serene, and whole. Mahvash has, as a skillful and gracious guide, given something back to the reader for daring to make it through. That gift is a word of advice from the other side of the journey, that we may only be midway through: that the pain of life is necessary in order to gain an appreciation for the rewards that await us on the other side of it. “Living was falling upside down/ In an empty void, hanging on to a piece of rope . . .All that so at last, I may embrace God.”To me, Mahvash has always captured the kunstwollen (the will to create) spirit which is also found in the works of many folk and outsider artists in the United States. Although, her work appears to be whimsical and stylized, it actually is very narrative and filled with deep seeds of emotion on every canvas and in every poem. Her creative spirit is directly linked to her daily experiences and to her relationships. Mahvash does not try to interpret and create conceptual or abstract works from these experiences, but aims to create art that is honest and true to her own spirit and being.After many years of work, some artists begin to create art for others. Mahvash has always remained dedicated to painting and writing for herself first and foremost. That is what makes her work very powerful and honest.

Bijan
Designer
Mahvash has so many surprises inside her heart that I am truly astonished! The colors in her paintings reminds me of the colors I choose when designing my clothes Mahvash expresses herself in her poetry as being “only a traveler passing Through” I say in life we are all travelers passing through. The beautiful words written in her poetry has touched me deeply. And I am wishing her all the very best,
Designer

Artesian
Magazine of upwelling art and creativityIn My Painted Dreams, you may find yourself deep in thought with the correlation between the written word and the painted images. It is necessary to add that both are profound. To approach Mahvash’s work, you have to let go of the excess baggage in your head and be ready to converge into the simplicity of human emotion. The poems like the pictures have a chronological arrangement that tell a story of a sensitive woman’s life, a woman, who is in tune with herself and is in search of a greater spiritual fulfillment.Mahvash’s book is imaginative in design and conception. The aesthetic simplicity of its style identifies with a timelessness that is universal. Rich in her images and perceptive in her poetry makes this book an extraordinary and rewarding experience.It has left me with a sense of peace that I have not realized for a long time.

 Irvine world newsMahvash’s work has to do with women and women’s issues. She paints everyday life, things that affect her, one day happy, one day mad. ” The same comes trough in her poetry in “my painted dreams.” There are such titles as “She makes a salad,” “bad hair day,” “the guests,” “The tourist.” The supermarket,” “The perfect wife” All go deeper using symbolism and dream imagery much as she does in her paintings. Her work is “dreamlike” and “spiritual,” for instance, She turns The simple act of chopping onions into a soul-searching poem. Her expression in her painting of a little girl within also comes out in her poem, “little girl found,” in which all her selves, young, present, and The future older women She will become are united. 

Rebecca Alban Hoffberger
Director/Founder of AMERICAN VISIONARY ART MUSEUMThere is a sensitivity that at first sees itself as male or female, middle eastern, western, African, or Asian, but as it expresses itself from magma closer to its core, it transcends The outer flavors and learns to speak to each of us, all of us, of what is life itself. Such was, is, and ever-shall-be, The timelessness of Rumi. In My painted Dreams, author and Artist Mahvash Mossaed, sets out to express woman and The middle easterner, and Enters into The sunshine of beyond. 

Maryam Ovissi
Director/Founder of Ovissi Gallery Mahvash writes with a voice filled with a range of emotion that all women can relate to. Both her paintings and poetry are a ramification of extreme emotions She experiences daily and even under The most mundane circumstances.“My Painted Dreams” presents a wonderful selection of poetry well paired with paintings. It is almost as though She created each poem for The specific piece depicted…or perhaps vice versa.To me, Mahvash has always captured The kunstwollen (The will to create) spirit which is also found in The works of many folk and outsider artists in The United States. Although, her work appears to be whimsical and stylized, it actually is very narrative and filled with deep seeds of emotion on every canvas and in every poem. Her creative spirit is directly linked to her daily experiences and to her relationships. Mahvash does not try to interpret and create conceptual or abstract works from these experiences, but aims to create art that is honest and true to her own spirit and being.After many years of work, some artists begin to create art for others. Mahvash has always remained dedicated to painting and writing for herself first and foremost. That is what makes her work very powerful and honest.