Seungbo Roh, Reha Shisodia & Hamid Iravani – International Art Exhibition – Artist Portfolio Magazine

2014 International Art Exhibition – Artist Portfolio Magazine

Seungbo Roh – Beachwood, OH

Seung Bo Roh was born in Seoul, South Korea, and currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio.  She received an M.F.A. from Hongik University  and  a  B.F.A. in Visual Design from Ewah Woman’s University, both in Seoul  South, Korea.  From 1986 through 1990 she worked for the Korean Food Company as a Designer, taking the lead in food advertisement and package design.  Additionally, from 1992 through 1998 Ms. Roh taught art at Hyundai Institute of Art.  As a creative artist she has been in numerous exhibitions including Kyung Hyang Gallery and Myungdong Gallery in Seoul and the Arts Center in Berlin, Germany.

Ms. Roh has received awards including the Grand Art Exhibition of Korea in the National Modern Art Museum in Seoul; World Peace Art Exhibition in the Danwon Museum, Ansan, South Korea; and Peace Arts in Kyungbokung Metro Museum, Seoul.  She is currently a member the National Association of Art in Korea, the National Association of Independent Artists and National Oil and the Acrylic Painters’ Society.

During the short time she has been in the United States, she has had several exhibitions including two person and group exhibitions at the Beachwood Community Art Center and Cuyahoga Community College, both in Cleveland, Ohio.  Ms. Roh continues to work diligently on her paintings, creating new work and furthering her vision as an artist.

Artist Statement

Seungbo Roh is a painter who lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio.  Her paintings are influenced by social complexities of the urban spaces in which we live. By focusing on these types of spaces, she wants to express feelings that are solemn and bleak, yet somehow splendid. Her work expresses the complexities of urban space, using the entire canvas to display these scenes in the second dimension. In addition, expanded second level dimensions and simple color are used to express her artistic intentions.

The instant space of her immediate environment is translated through her precise lines and brushstrokes onto the painting. In general, regardless of an object’s original color, she uses selective color to maximize the impact and emotion of the subject. Her works are based on daily life and experience, and communicates these instant images using geometric lines.  She tries to express the beauty of simple shapes. Colors shown in her paintings are primary colors. The use of bright hues reveals the theme of instant space through the relationship between light and color.

Her artistic style and work’s world are models in this global period of 21st century. Speedily changing, the expression of the theme of a symbol and an image is the expression of our time. This is the interpretation of the instant space. We can think, furthermore, that her works are considered to explore the notion of simulacra’s space.

Reha Shishodia – Mumbai, India

Art for me, is life. All the shades to my personality are drawn out through art. It is the language of my soul.

Hamid Iravani – Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Hamid Iravani has a Bachelor of Science in Urban Studies and Psychology and a Master in Urban Planning within the specialized field of Urban Design from Portland State University, Oregon in USA. He is also a contemporary artist painting abstract faces, personalities, attitudes, behavior and demeanor. He has taken many art, design and sculpture classes at university. He describes the impetus and underlying philosophy of his unique style of painting as a manifestation of several aspects in his life as follows.

I have drawn faces since I was a kid, to challenge myself, because I have always been obsessed about how a few features like two eyebrows, two eyes, one nose and one mouth have determined millions of faces throughout history, present and future, all of which are unique.

I have been developing transportation mathematical models for years, replicating travel behavior by relating trip making with transportation level of service and socio-economic variables. I feel there is also a relationship between the shapes on peoples’ faces with their behavior and personalities. My paintings reveal different characters by different line strokes, composition and color.

In my paintings, I always initially draw in a mindless stage and later plan the colors.  The different moods that I experience also impacts on the distinctive faces that I paint.

Being in the transportation planning business since the mid-eighties, I have always been concerned how traffic engineering has been ruining the character of our cities in recent decades. Unfortunately, modern cities have been shaped by traffic engineering standards and roads that are treated as conduits or pipelines. Artistic cities such as Rome, Isfahan, Prague, Paris, Florence, San Francisco, Venice, etc. are no longer being planned on the premise and excuse that traffic flows need to be efficient to avoid congestion. The result in fact has been the opposite: not only do traffic conditions on super highways and wide streets fail to avoid congestion, but the human scale of the resulting urban spaces have also been compromised by wider streets developed for cars so that these are now unfriendly and charmless to people. In summary, blame on conventional traffic engineering standards did not necessarily make me an anarchist who violates all standards, but rather led me to an approach by which form defines the standards, and not vice versa. So whereas my paintings lack typical standards as a dominating component, what I paint does include careful rules, composition, use of lines, colors and a notion of how space is allocated in any of the pieces I create.

I do not only paint pretty faces, I also paint bad and ugly faces. More importantly, however, I paint the inside beauty, and the inside uninhibitedness regardless of the surface appearance.

Finally, the poem by the great prominent Iranian poet of the 13th century, Rumi, has had a great influence on me and my painting of faces:

“I am a painter, a maker of faces ; every moment I shape a beauteous form,And then in thy presence I melt them all away.I call up a hundred phantoms and endue them with a spiritWhen I behold thy phantom, I cast them in the fire,Art thou the vintner’s cup-bearer or the enemy of him who is sober,Or is it thou who mak’st a ruin of every house I build ?In thee the soul is dissolved, with thee it is mingled,So I will cherish the soul, because it has a perfume of thee.”(Poem by Rumi, translated by Nicholson)