Iranian of the Day

San Francisco Chronicle: The Grave. That's what Mehri Dadgar and other imprisoned young Iranian women called the slow torture they endured: sitting blindfolded, cross-legged, silent and motionless in a small, isolated space 17 hours a day for months on end. It was even harder to take than being beaten on the soles of the feet with a chunk of steel cable. "The Grave was the harshest punishment I went through. It makes you crazy, really frustrated and crazy," says Dadgar, a Mill Valley artist who was arrested in 1981 for handing out pro-democracy newspapers. She spent five years in various Tehran prisons for refusing to sign a document accepting "the truth" of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's oppressive fundamentalist regime. Some of her friends were executed, others snapped.

"Sometimes I think art saved me from insanity, because I was always making stories in my mind," says Dadgar, who punched The Grave walls in a desperate rage. She now makes richly colored and patterned paintings - a mix of ancient Islamic forms and Western abstraction - that, as she puts, "celebrate the universal God of infinite love and mercy."

A half dozen or so on view at Mill Valley's Barefoot Art Gallery in a show called "From Reality to God Almighty." It includes pen and watercolor drawings depicting her painful prison experience and some delicate little gouaches that riff on Persian miniature paintings. A self-portrait shows a figure in a chador, or body-covering cloak, sitting blindfolded on a blue-fringed blanket facing a brick wall that bears her shadow. Dadgar made similar images before leaving Iran with her then-husband in the 1990s, but she hid them for fear of being arrested >>> (Photo by Eric Luse / The Chronicle)