The tale of “Sweetie Little Goaty” (The Goat and her Kids) is one of great importance and reputation in the Iranian culture; one that has been illustrated in several books, cartoons, and plays. In almost every culture you can find such fairy tales, especially for kids to teach them “good” and “evil”. These stories are told in the form of animal lives and characters on the ground that kids feel more intimacy and believability for animalistic stories. In ancient Persian culture we have the example of “Kelileh and Demneh”, but also the tale of “Sweetie Little Goaty”, likewise several other tales have been represented in different ways within various culture, e.g. the tale of “Three Pigs” in the American culture.
In this painting I have tried to illustrate my own image of the tale, based on the cartoons and books I had seen in my childhood and the impression I got as a child being told the story: a wolf trying to deceive kids, the naive kids unaware of all the deceitful and evil thoughts of the wolf, a happy ending by the arrival of the “mother” who even rescues “Habbeh Angour”—the kid swallowed by the wolf…
?\28 years of age, still I find this tale interesting. Now I am preoccupied by the concept of “peace” between the wolf and the goat or the pig; the cease-fire of the hunter and the prey, peace between the one who is armed with sharp teeth, bomb, power, and … and the one with no defense. I have tried in this painting to signify the possible peace between the wolf and “Sweetie Little Goaty”, based on the old tradition of hospitality and the host’s granting presents to the guest. The question still remains whether this tale—like the plays in our childhood—will have a happy ending. This is the ambiguity I have tried to present in my work; a question of “peace”, a permanent one; and coming that day, will this hospitality last? Coexistence and communication of different breeds of human beings; no war and with a dialogue of peace…
For this collaboration, the demand was to build. I wanted to take what was given visually and conceptually in Vana’s rich painting and create something that would deepen its narrative, rather than expand it outward. The painting illustrates a gesture of peace, but the affair is open-ended and pregnant with tension: tension between wolf and goat, man and woman, human and animal, clothed and naked, the revealed and the hidden; the two painted panels I have added attempt to ally with those relationships. Painting, in its deployment of the static image, is such that you can see every moment in the narrative depicted simultaneously. Vana’s central painting illustrates the pivotal moment of an accord, and the panels I have added attempt to embody the conditions of chaos and peace that surround it previously and subsequently in time.