“You are who you are based on the perfection of your senses. The more sophisticated you are, the more sophisticated the results will be.”
-Georgia Amar
Artist Spotlight: Georgia Amar
Grade school in the Moroccan city of Mogodar is a mixed bag. Along with the obligatory reading, writing, and arithmetic, students learn utilitarian skills. Today’s lesson: how to effectively open a pomegranate.
The students watch as their instructor brandishes a knife and slices through the fruit’s hard, bitter flesh. He makes quick work of the burgundy orb, finishing his task with six equal sections of glistening red seeds. A job well done.
For most students, this is just a simple exercise. They’ll return home and set about happily slicing open pomegranates just as their teacher had shown them. Or they would’ve if it hadn’t been for Georgia Amar.
Georgia has always been a keen observer of the natural world. She always prefers to figure things out for herself, using careful observation and thoughtful reasoning. When she watched the teacher’s demonstration she was immediately skeptical.
When the teacher looked at the pomegranate, he only saw a problem to be solved, a shield of hard skin standing between him and delicious seeds. But when Georgia looked at the pomegranate, she saw something more: a living breathing thing.
To Georgia, her teacher wasn’t just slicing the fruit, he was disrespecting it. If he had taken a little time to get to know it and its form, he would’ve known that the pomegranate has ways of repaying such brutal coercion. You see, when you cut open a pomegranate with a knife, the blade captures some of the skin’s unsavory residue and carries it inside, polluting the sweet inner seeds.
Georgia had a different way.
Jumping to the front of the class, she seizes a new specimen. She caresses its surface, feeling for the connective tissue between the seed pockets. Then, carefully and methodically she applies pressure, gently working her way around the coarse exterior. With each rotation the pomegranate yields to her touch and soon enough, it pops open, baring its seeds free of contamination.
Her teacher is stunned, it had never crossed his mind that there might be more than one way to open a pomegranate.
Little moments of clarity like this are typical when spending any amount of time with Georgia Amar. That’s because she isn’t just an artist when she’s painting. For her, being an artist is a way of life. It’s how she stays receptive to the world and it’s this particular kind of curiosity that enables her to live with a kind of intuitive grace. Problem seem to unfold effortlessly before her, bearing their fruit like a pomegranate in her hands. To observers, it often appears that Georgia Amar has received a blessing, but the truth is much simpler.
Georgia Amar sees things that no one else can merely because she is open to it. She learned long ago that nature will never conform to fit you or your ideas. Instead of struggling against this reality, like paddling upstream against a strong current, she’s learned to travel with it. Georgia is receptive to the signs that so many others ignore and because of this, she flourishes. There is an ancient kind of wisdom in her approach and the results of her method speak volumes.
Aside from being a painter, Georgia is an accomplished educator. In Georgia’s classes, you can find six-year-olds and sixty-year-olds painting side by side. This isn’t always an easy balance to strike but Georgia’s teaching method is so intuitive and accessible that she’s able to consistently get results from all her students. In teaching, her philosophy is the same as in life. She allows her students to learn through experience as she teaches them to value their own curiosity above any other influences.
In this way, she is more like a shaman, guiding her students through unfamiliar terrain without prescribing their path, acquainting them the beauty they already possessed rather than drilling them in an external idea of greatness.
“Those were the days of paradise.”
-Georgia Amar
Georgia Amar began learning the rules of the game from a very young age. As a child, she saw North African society with her usual clarity, distilling the complex hierarchy of society into a system for her and her siblings to reenact. They were playing life instead of house: one child taking up the role of King, a few others as bishops and bankers, and the rest as slaves. They exchanged bottle caps as currency and set about mimicked the proceedings of the world around them and they sometimes found valuable lessons in the exercise.
She noticed, for example, that at the end of the game, the bankers always seemed to end up with all the bottle-caps
Or that if you mistreated the slaves in one game, you could expect the harsh treatment when one of them became king in the next.
Today, Georgia is still playing that same game. She and her husband, Jack Pappalardo, are two of the founding members of Denver’s Art District on Santa Fe. They arrived in Denver in the early seventies hoping to find a place where they could surround themselves with creative people. Upon discovered that no such environment existed, they set about making one.
Today, Georgia Amar Fine Art is one of the centerpieces of a flourishing art district on Santa Fe. There you can find an extensive collection of work from Amar as well as other artists.
Amar’s work is precisely executed with the learned eye of a lifelong artist. The pieces available at her Gallery offer an eclectic mix of style and subject matter ranging from landscapes to abstraction. Any trip through the Art District would truly be incomplete without a visit to this staple Denver’s creative community.
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