Untitled 1989

Mostafa Dashti made this unnamed watercolour in 1960. The ochre paints a dreamscape of sand and sky. It looks like the artist was trying to conjure a place and a feeling, maybe a memory of a desert highway, conjured in a haze of heat. I can imagine him, the artist, with his watercolours, trying to get down what he sees—or thinks he sees, or remembers seeing. It reminds me of Fairfield Porter, but with a Middle Eastern light. You can see the marks of the brushstrokes, and feel the movement of the water on the paper, and there is a sense of immediacy, capturing a transient moment, one of those that otherwise disappears. And in the end, it's about a collective, ongoing act of image-making: artists talking to artists, across time, inspiring each other to see and paint the world.