About
the studio and the hand behind it
This is the working studio of Niloofar K. Afshar, written in the first person. The institutional account lives at Nilpar Gallery; this is the closer, more personal one.
How the work is madeI am an Iranian-born artist, and my practice is grounded in Tazhib, the tradition of Persian illumination. I came to it not as history to be preserved, but as a living visual language I could keep speaking.
My work draws from the visual grammar of illumination and ornamental fine art: Eslimi scrollwork, Khatai floral forms, the quiet logic of geometric symmetry. I reinterpret that grammar through contemporary scale and surface, asking what these patterns hold when they are made slowly, by hand, today.
Training
A discipline learned by the hand
I trained formally in Tazhib under master artist Mohsen Aghamiri at the Shidnegar Institution. Illumination is not learned quickly. It is learned through repetition: the same line drawn until the hand knows it, the same flower opened a hundred times until it is no longer copied but remembered.
That repetition is still how I work. Each piece begins in drawing, and the structure of the pattern is followed rather than approximated. The discipline gives me a ground to stand on, and from there the work can be personal.
Material
Gouache and gold on handmade paper
I work in gouache and gold on handmade paper. The surface is prepared by hand before anything is painted; the gold is laid in layers and burnished until it holds light like a mirror. The colour is built slowly, and the geometry is followed, not improvised.
The pace is deliberate. A single work can take weeks, and I have come to trust that slowness. It is where the patience of the old manuscripts and my own attention meet.
The carried pattern
A language brought across distance
I make this work far from where it began. For me the Persian pattern has become a carried fragment: a language of memory, belonging, and survival that I brought with me to the other side of the world. Through the work, I keep it alive.
I think of each piece as a place that makes room, holding what it is given without asking it to disappear.
The studio and the gallery
Where the work is shown
I founded Nilpar Gallery to give the work an institutional home. The gallery holds the public collection record, the catalogue detail, and all acquisition correspondence; it responds personally to written inquiry. This studio site is the quieter side of the same practice, where the making, the notes, and the thinking live.
Visit Nilpar GalleryContinue through the studio.