The Young Kurdish Artist

Everyone loves a great painting. While art has become a buzzword in the past few decades, some works of art have transcended cultures and defined eras.  The debate about the ‘greatest painting’ is a highly subjective one; exciting and equally controversial. 

Rawand Jaafar is a young Kurdish painter and artist born in Erbil in 1993. He completed the Institute of Fine Arts in 2008 and The Academy of Fine Arts in 2013. So far, he has taken part in 16 various exhibitions.

He opened his solo exhibition in 2012 and is now a teacher at the Private Lawik Institute of Art. This time’s selection of a young artist goes back to Rawand’s academic and skilful work in materializing the topics and forms and composing the colours in an educational format, which has grabbed the artist’s and audience’s attention. While wandering through Media Gallery and observing his 35 artworks in his solo exhibition, I understood they were beautiful.

This made me know that one artist’s development and creativity do not solely depend on the number of years of experience. It’s the quality of his works which is essential, not the quantity. If we take a detailed look at Rawand’s works, we see many aspects and artistic principles worth mentioning, including academics which is a well-based school of painting. It will reveal the beauty of art and the level of the artist’s success in his work.

The nature and mountains of Kurdistan and Kurdish culture have been composed intelligently in his career. He sometimes uses contrasting colours that take the audience’s attention. Linking academics with realist-expressionism expands the form of ideas and thoughts of the artist. Now, as a young teacher, he tends to improve the student’s ability to perform their work while demonstrating a high value of the art. His use and choice of colour res semble reality and the not true, for example, the nature of mountains of Kurdistan such as Rawanduz, Korek, Erbil Citadel, and Harirer. The nature of the country has become the bases of his work. Carrying out these in large measures has magnified the view in the eyes of the audience.

Rawand has put the experience of design, watercolour, oil colour and academics into his works. He’s achieved precision. International artists influenced the young artist as he studied art history and figured out the styles and forms that the international artists used, especially in the golden era, which is the Renaissance period. If Ranwand’s drawings were in a museum, they would receive much attention, preservation, and value in the galleries. Rawand’s active ties expressed his deep interest and ambition in his works. Teaching a generation has become a professional piece of art that creates a group d youth that would be able to lay the foundation of the literary art of Kurdistan. Sketching and planning for new ideas can be challenging. The artist often uses nature and visits a particular place to draw a detailed and accurate design for composing them in 3 or 4 meters drawings, and then the colours give life to the pictures. All these details are gathered in a place where form and composition complete one another.

By Ashti Garmiyani

Editor Davan Y Khalil