An Artist Takes a Moment

Shahidi is interested in water, she says; not only drawing it but using it as a material. “Ink has a liquid quality that is so different from using a pen,” she says. “Everything is water around me now.”

On the other side of the small studio, several large sheets of paper lie on the floor. They resemble intricate topographic maps, drawn in pale gray. But Shahidi didn’t draw them. The marbling technique is a traditional one used in Japan, she says: she deposits a drop of ink and a drop of soapy water, then repeats hundreds of times until the landscapes create themselves and fill the page.

“We have the technique in Iran,” she says. It’s called abr-o-bâd: “The cloud and the wind,” she says it means.

Shahidi tries to visit the ocean every day to look at the water. “I miss it whenever I don’t go,” she says. She goes in the morning or whenever she needs a moment. “Before I start everything,” she says, “and whenever I’m frustrated.

“I can’t call it loving something,” says Shahidi about her interest in the sea. “I’ve never thought about it like that.” She considers a moment longer: “It probably is love.”