Sacred Gardens
Shari Keller, Ph.D.
Gardens have always held a deep significance for Laurie Blum, as they had for the great Persian mystics whose poetic visions are memorialized in her paintings. Years ago, Blum created her own Persian garden, replete with a rare assortment of rocks, waterfall, and pool. Since that time, she has traveled to Iran, where she discovered, in the secret alchemy of gardens, a passageway to the mystical interior of one’s self. For those who seek with the "eye of the Heart," Blum’s Broadway Gallery exhibition depicts the ethereal Immanence of the Divine garden.
Laurie Blum has made three trips to Iran and the Middle East in recent years, each time painting in the gardens and scenes represented in this exhibit–in the garden of Hafez’s tomb shrine, the tomb of Sa’adi, the Garden of Paradise (Bagh-e-Eram); by the Majnun tree, and the Cypress tree (Sarv Naz). Blum says, she considers Shiraz to be the most beautiful place on earth. Shiraz is also the burial place of Hafez, the great Sufi sage and poet. Hafez captured the ineffable in rhyme; to this day in Iran, his poems are regarded as sacred oracles, transfiguring visions of a mystical Absolute.
Blum’s fanciful yet representational style is ideally matched to the mystical quality of her subject. We become intoxicated by the stillness of the place in her expressions in Hafez’s Tomb. We are transported by the almost tangible fragrance of the roses in Blum’s depiction of Nightingales and Roses, just as the nightingales are who sit among them–nearly lost in rapture. We are struck by the majestic nature of the cypress through Blum’s Cypress Tree–the cypress being a symbol of inner strength and poise in the poetry of the Muslim Mystics. And her Conference of the Birds, inspired by Attar’s story of the mythical Simurgh bird, bespeaks, with enchantingly innocent excitement, the quest of the soul to find its maker, only to be guided, in the end, to look within. Blum’s painting medium is gouache on paper, which gives an effervescent quality to her work, a subtle, dancing light across the paper. Her striking Shiraz-style greens and blues, her sharp contrasts in color and tone, capture the vibrancy of the meeting place between the two worlds–the Visible and the Invisible–which is what the Persian garden, finally, symbolizes.
Shari Keller’s article can be read in its entirety at www.laurieblum.com. Laurie Blum exhibited "My Inner-Outer Garden at Broadway Gallery from July 1-July 15, 2005. The exhibit has also been displayed in Meherabad, India and in Myrtle Beach, S.C. It will be displayed in Istanbul, Turkey, in Teheran at the Shah’s Palace Art Museum, in Esfahan, Yezd, and again in Shiraz, Iran. In 2004, the Shiraz Institute of Cultural Affairs granted Blum the honor of being the first painter to exhibit her work at the tomb shrine of Hafez in Shiraz, Iran.
