Paper and Glass
A quiet homage to Behzad
Two figures sit centuries apart in the same pose. One paints on paper. The other draws on glass. A bearded figure sits barefoot, folded inward, absorbed in the act of painting. Then there is mine: bent over an iPad in the same posture of concentration, the same withdrawal from the world.
The first image is called Portrait of an Artist, usually attributed to Kamal ud-Din Behzad, though the attribution remains uncertain. Working in Herat and later Tabriz around the turn of the sixteenth century, Behzad transformed Persian miniature painting by paying close attention to lived experience and inwardness.
Behzad has long been one of my favourite painters, much in the way that Pieter Bruegel the Elder, working in the Netherlands at roughly the same time, turned his attention toward peasants and everyday life.
I often wonder what these two would have made of the tools I use today. Bruegel would likely have been a master of the drone, using a bird’s-eye view to capture the chaotic pulse of a modern city in a single gigapixel frame. Behzad, with his love of geometric precision and layered spaces, might well have become a designer of interfaces, treating the screen not as a window but as an ordered field of light.
For now, I am simply the twenty-first-century continuation of that silhouette on the floor. My iPad is an evolution of his paper and gold leaf, a piece of glass containing more colours than he could ever have ground from stone. Yet as I hunch over my lap, I realise that the artist’s hunch is the true constant. There is no high-tech shortcut for the way a body must fold inward to find focus. The tools have changed, but the posture has not.
© Mehrdad Aref-Adib 2026
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