An artist’s pigments from the Strait of Hormuz

Good morning, DMV! It’s Wednesday, Sept. 23.

This summer, a friend and I were walking through Touchstone Gallery in downtown D.C. when she paused in front of an artwork and read its label aloud: made with pigments from the Strait of Hormuz.

Interesting.

I doubled back to look at it again: an abstract made with pieces of handmade mulberry paper, dyed brown. The artist: Saya Behnam.

Several days later, I looked through her work online. The piece above is part of her Strait of Hormuz series. I reached out to her to learn more, but we never quite managed to connect.

Then a few weekends ago during an outing in Alexandria, my husband and I were checking out the Torpedo Factory Art Center when I spotted a piece I recognized from her website.

I walked into the gallery and asked, “Are you Saya?” I explained I had been trying to connect with her to learn more about her Hormuz series. What a pleasant surprise to find her by chance in person. So we spoke.

Saya, who is in her 50s, was born in Tehran, Iran, and moved to the United States about 30 years ago. She lives in Loudoun County.

Her work, she said, is mostly about beauty in nature, flowers and gardens. She works with handmade paper and natural colors and pigments that she sources from around the world.

Several years ago, she learned about ochre pigments — yellow, red and brown — from the Strait of Hormuz, and she asked a friend to bring some back from Iran. For years, they sat on a shelf unused.

Then in late February, the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran. In retaliation, Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's busiest oil shipping channels. And Saya thought of those pigments.

“After these things started, I looked at them, I said, ‘Oh, I have the real soil of this place,’” she told me. “I'm not a war artist. I'm not a political artist. My work is mostly expanding or spreading beauty about nature.”

She wondered how she could show in her artwork the conflict between beauty and destruction. She started with the motif from her previous work — creating petals or flowers of handmade paper.

“But now,” she said, “I'm just using these three sets of colors that I have, and starting to burn the surface of these papers to show the conflict between beauty and war, destruction and creation.”

Strait of Hormuz is a series in progress. Hormuz 3, below, is on exhibit through Dec. 11 in a group show at the Eye Street Gallery of the D.C. Commission on the Art and Humanities at 200 I St. SE.

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