Living With Art

I walk by the Venet "bouquet" daily and my mind takes happy record. I catch it from the corner of my eye or stop and stare. But always that same feeling.

The feeling is akin to the one I felt when I devotedly sat by the Henry Moore reclining figure in the Geneva park, when I was a teenager. I still do. But my affair with that sculpture is decades old.

I wake up and sleep to the pastel colours of Farhadian, to the four women who stand in pose. To the flamingos in the indifferent background. Why do flamingos always appear pink and indifferent? The painting I hung in my bedroom speaks to me daily. I interact with it visually.

When I tutor my son, and I wait for him to solve the problem, I gaze at the politics of my region, at Beyrouth bombings or at the Dome of the Rock and its juxtaposed Tel Aviv ravers.

As a child of the seventies, with the eccentric imagination of the times, I imagined stepping into the wallpapered images people put of forests and sunsets in doctors' waiting rooms or even in their dining rooms. In my living room, a white snowed forest grows. Daily, I trudge under its desolate and delicate branches and I remember Farideh Lashai's company and philosophy.