Monday, March 16, 2009

Back to Iranian Asb (horse and ... GIMP)


Czolem,
this time I am going to return for a moment to the subject of Ancient Iranians and their horses.
A couple years ago my friend Kaveh Farrokh wrote a book titled "Shadows in the Desert", on the military history of pre-Islamic Iran, and he asked me to paint a Parthian for his book. Happily and quite honored by his request I did this little watercolor for this Osprey book, see the link to googlebooks preview of the book. Coincidently his book has become quite popular.
http://books.google.com/books?id=p7kltwf9yrwC&pg=PA134&lpg=PA134&dq=persia+at+war+wielec&source=bl&ots=1BDxjEmyky&sig=6uR0ZfzX4PZwb1WeQrq63xjM_pA&hl=en&ei=9b6-SYLOOtKJtgfoubD4Cw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
Lately, after a long hiatus in my own artistic work, I first scanned and have been 'redoing' my old drawings and paintings using this quite fine graphic manipulation program known as GIMP. Instead of a mouse Iam using a device known as the Wacom tablet with gripen.

This new 'painting' technique is quite enjoyable and I am learning, and since this post is on the Iranians and their horses, I will start with this older image of a Parthian archer, and it was published by Inforteditions military book publisher from Chorzow Poland, in their book on the battle of Philippi (42 B.C) http://www.wanax.pl/index.php?p456,filippi-23-x-42-p-n-e .
Anyway, both sides to this battle, Octavian-Marcus Antonius and Brutus-Longinus, employed cavalry units drawn (hired) from across the Roman frontier, i.e., the Parthian Empire.

Whereas it is unknown if there were any Parthian cathaphracts (heavy-armored cavalry with long lances and armored horses ) in this battle, it is quite known that Parthian archers were present, for they were hired with a blessing form the High King. And my watercolor was to show one of the archers, using a horned saddle (Peter Connolly reconstructed one almost 20 years ago) and riding a stallion with a cranellated (cut) mane and fabric-wrapped tail, ancient Central Asian custom...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, Dario - cool horse art and a very cool subject for a blog.

Dario T. W. said...

Girasol,
thank you very much for your visit and I will keep my caballeros and caballos coming :)

Big Allen said...

As an American whose grandparents immigrated from Iran let me tell you the drawings of the horse, اسب
written in farsi and pronounced "asb" phonetically in farsi is ut-most cool.
Let me give you some references for Iranian stuff in NYC area:
http://www.ahacorp.com/yellowpages.htm

Also:
http://www.iranica.com/newsite/

There is also:
http://www.fis-iran.org/en

Dario T. W. said...

Allensan,
arigato domo :)

thank you very much
Khoda Hafez