Aslan

Aslan Ali Shafaei was born on 1948 in Khoshkenab village, Heris, Azerbaijan. He has been all his life there. He learned writing and reading from his father who was a teacher. When he was a child, gypsies and curtain readers went to their village for watching whose shows he paid all his salary. He liked the paintings on the curtains. He used to copy the stone printed books when he was young. These stone books had also paintings. No one thought him how to paint. He himself has eagerly chosen this way. When he was free of farming and animal husbandry, he painted the paintings on curtains. He said:''The only thing that made me to do this is love, and everyone calls lovers mad, but we should be patient. You shouldn’t understand anything but painting, even pains. You should pay attention just to painting and suddenly you would see you made a creation''. Aslan falls in love with painting and curtains. If he was empty of love and hope, he wouldn’t paint. In his opinion you can even move the mountains with the power of love. Aslan is full of paintings and stories. His paintings aren’t fixed on walls. He carries them with himself anywhere he would like to go and sets them on any wall he wants and tell their stories, the stories painted on the curtains. He painted the good people with beautiful faces. In the past, his home was full of guests and he told the stories and he knew this very well to incorrupt telling the story exactly in the most exciting part of it and keep the last parts for other nights. He believes that everything in life is hidden in the stories but people don’t care. His paintings are full of curves and edges. Several stories, hundreds of people, individual events, divergent people from all parts of history and myth in his paintings that the only one who knows the story of them is he himself. He said:” Hosein Hamedani, Hosein Gullar Aghasi, Seyed Hosein Arab, Mohammad Farahani,… were all curtain painters and they are dead now and I’ve spent most of my lifetime and less is remained.” His art is describing a part of oral and unwritten history. He is the narrator of some part of our lives. His paintings is the image of world that is simply watched and painted. Aslan is an event in an abandoned village. Leyla Sabouri