The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> My Resume

My Resume
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Friday, February 16 2007, 16:42:01 (CET)
from 189.162.97.172 - dsl-189-162-97-172.prod-infinitum.com.mx Mexico - Windows XP - Internet Explorer
Website:
Website title:

My Resume.

I suppose I shouldn’t be the one to write these things, but since my resume is being written and embellished all the time by others with the intention of proving how unfit I am to draw breath…and since I now have to write one of my own for gallery owners…to help them present me to potential buyers, who are all looking for the next Van Gogh, but want him to be graduated from a real art school this time and to bring with him already a long list of past buyers.

I like best the biography/resume that appears on the art site…”Farid Parhad was born in Iraq and now lives in Mexico where he works”. What more do you need to know? Artists mostly write their own resumes, writing of themselves in the third person such as: “Farid Parhad is a singularly gifted sculptor who, besides sculpting as Michaelangelo would have if he was Farid, can play Beethoven’s Ninth Sympathy, while roller skating, on his nipples.”

But in Assyria, where no one has anything good to say about anyone who can do anything well, I mean really well…and not “good enough for an Assyrian”…one has to write one’s own resume and, if one is really smart, the epitah as well.

I was born in Baghdad in 1947 and grew up mostly in Kuwait, Iraq and California in the United States. I was an indifferent student, being asked to leave Art and Spanish class and sent home from school on a few occaisions.

At eighteen I decided to be a sculptor, why I’ll never know…and applied to the Fine Arts Department at the University of Washington in Seattle, to which I traveled by riding freights from California…a preferred mode of travel I rather enjoyed. Being accepted there but not liking what I saw I enrolled at the University of California at Berekeley in art and sculpture classes and attended all of one day before leaving.

Returning to Seattle with the intention of entering Law School I found volunteer work with Seattle Public Defenders in their Juvenile Division as an investigator. My work on behalf of our juvenile offenders led me to establish my own group-home for juvenile delinquents of which some thirty passed through the door in three years. I was awarded a grant from the Law and Justice Division of the United States Justice Department to strand myself and five boys on an island off the Washington coast for six weeks.

After this adventure, I closed the facility and returned to San Francisco to complete a degree in Sociology. Leaving with only three credits to go, I moved to New York to finally pursue art and sculpture in my own way. I found work at bronze casting foundries in order to learn the technique but also to cut down on costs.

At the same time I came across Assyrian art, for the first time in my life, and spent the next four years ‘studying” at the Metropolitan Museum by copying sculpture in their galleries…mostly Assyrian sculpture.

Returning to California in 1980, I began to dream of and work to create an Assyrian monument to place in San Francisco and with the help of members of our community, I managed to do so in 1988. That same year I began work on a second monument which was accepted by the city of Chicago in 1996. I next began work on a monument of Hammurabi to be installed in Detroit but was never able to complete it. Additionally I made several bronzes and one series of portraits of Assyrian kings.

An ongoing project which I’ve worked at since 1978 is to make portraits of major characters from the plays of William Shakespeare. I’ve gone through a few styles and may just have found the right one in which to complete it.

These things take time.



---------------------


The full topic:



Content-length: 3989
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
---------------: ----- -------
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/vnd.ms-excel, applicatio...
Accept-language: es-mx
Cache-control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.2Edj.
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9