'Artists can translate the beauty of reality.'
Ali Ghassan is an artist living and teaching in Denver Colorado. Born in Babel, Iraq, Ali is classically trained in fine arts across many disciplines, having studied in Iraq, Italy and Russia.
Where is your current studio? What would be your dream studio?
Located in: Denver. Do you prefer to work in silence or does certain music inspire you? Of course, with music, sometimes audio, books on international stories, philosophical books, or philosophy of beauty.
Studio life can lead to isolation, how do you address this/ keep a balance?
I do not consider it a cause of isolation, I consider my studio as a window for me to meditate or dive into the depths of my self or stay away from the noise around me to meditate, I love my studio when I was in my country I spend a lot of days in my studio without going out it helped me to discover myself. Certainly, I am a person who likes the community, but for some times, I go out and talk to people outside for specific and limited times, for the purposes of contemplating other people's souls, learning from their experiences, and listening to them is a kind of life experience or a desire to feel for others. There are many reasons.
Describe a moment you had an epiphany concerning your creative life?
Certainly, when I discovered the secrets of the ancient masters from the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and nineteenth-century artists, there were many changes that led me to understand true beauty and delve into nature in order to discover the true meaning of beauty, in fact, I learned a lot from them and through this a love for life and a desire occurred To adhere to it and provide me with hope, to produce beauty, or to teach students how to perceive and feel the true beauty in nature.
What is your favourite/ least favourite part of the creative process?
There are many things, the first of which is the creative process in itself, and how the creation process takes place and the challenges that face us from nature and its elements to achieve this illusion that resembles reality and is expressed with some tools to achieve a creative translation of reality. Because you must maintain the spirit of the form and use the simplification that gives you a true translation of reality. This needs a high craft in order to create something that describes the impact but differs from it with formative elements. I can tell you that I enjoy the work stages and I will be sad at times if the work is finished because I am in joy through the creative process stages.
Do you have a personal mantra or quote which serves to motivate you?
The incantation that I use Hahaha, I like to smell of colors or the scent of my studio, which is full of the scent of colors, it creates in me the desire and hedonism to the production of the art in front of the easel, also. Thinking about the molecules that produced that beauty just to think about them creates a desire for the creative process in me.
How has your style evolved and what contributed to the changes?
My style developed through an in-depth understanding of real beauty through reality. The more this understanding increases, the more my style develops in art, because my art is a description or translation of the beauty of reality.
Describe an obstacle you have faced and how did you overcome it?
My life has many obstacles, the first of which is that you love art in a society full of wars, I am from Iraq and have lived through most of the wars that Iraq has gone through, and people did not think about art as much as they think about salvation, yet I preserved this inner purity called art, and put art in an envelope I was like a black box for a plane in order to escape the scourge of wars because I was living with very great hope And I thought that someday I would be able to open this box full of true beauty scents, in order to spread it to the world, which means overcoming all the obstacles that were inside me is armed with hope, and working sincerely in order to dig ways for my hope to walk.
Nature versus nurture- do you believe you have inherited abilities from creative parents, do you have creative siblings? Can you identify environmental factors or influences which led to your choices or directions?
Although there are many artists in my family, I do not believe that art is a talent. It is the accumulation of experiences that any person can learn through training and starting from the spirit of science, and this is what was brought by the artists of the Renaissance, there are many elements of art that are not born by chance, such as perspective and color science related to physics And making the colors related to chemistry, anatomy and other sciences, these are all sciences that man cannot inherit by chance. I consider the term talent is an incorrect term and gel, you can review a book (the talent cod to daniel coyle). Any person who can be an artist if he learns Art is from a professor who has real experience in the sciences of art that I mentioned to you a little while ago, so I established an art academy that works on this concept. Anyone can learn art from any age with a well thought out method.
Is there something you regard as essential to your preparation or process?
Certainly the true love of what you do The sincerity and the true understanding of the craft that is very important to the creative process is like a tongue with which we can speak and without it no human being can speak Detail a moment which was the highlight for you, thus far. There are many of them, but the most important of them is that I became an American citizen, it is a moment that made me extremely happy, I consider myself like the first immigrants, those who came to America carrying dreams and hopes (the American dream) and I have a lot that I want to present to this country that respected my experiences and my art and gave me a lot.
If you could time travel, what advice would you give the younger you, regarding pursuing your artmaking?
The advice that I would recommend to anyone, in general, is to be patient and hold on to hope, no matter how difficult the circumstances, and tell them to carefully look at my art because it was created from very difficult circumstances in which people could not achieve something, and I struggled to produce beauty to be transmitted through the generations.
How does your work respond to social trends?
My art is drawn from society and it is a mirror that reflects the beauty of reality What do you hope to convey through your work? I hope to convey through my art an aesthetic message to stimulate within the beholder all the noble values, and to send hope to you a person, and to stimulate within them the love of goodness and human giving.
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