Beyond the Bend

by Paula Michele Wagoner

FLOWING AROUND A NEWLY REBUILT DOCK set in a secret spot is Mally Khorasantchi’s personal estuary, where mangroves and bamboo shoots wrestle with dense Florida fauna pressed against banks of a caramel canal. White ibis and night herons pick at the shallows while ospreys above call out for supper. Whirling with leaves and debris and snapping turtles bobbing for our pound cake crumbs, this waterway is the setting for her contemplation, studio work, and this interview. She shares the enchantment with friends and guests, an occasional kayaker passerby, and all that thrives. This place is recovering still from the devastation of Hurricane Ian, but with most things in nature that break, it also finds a way to heal and emerge into a new shape.

Mally’s paintings reflect the patterns and shapes in nature we often miss, allowing the viewer to harness a sense of wonder for the subtropics through a deliberate arrangement of painting, photography, and magazine collage. Sapphire roots of mangrove, coral hexagon patterns of honeycombs and silvertone photos of leaves enable the viewer to witness an entire piece one moment at a time.

Recently, Ali, Khorasantchi’s loving husband of 42 years, passed away. Both were parents to four children and this great loss, along with the recovery from Hurricane Ian, has inevitably created a new season in Mally’s life. We talked about how the recovery and grieving processes are so interwoven and how one navigates this as a woman and as an artist.

“All these things are connected to that big thing called life and it is your approach to how you handle that. It’s a very natural thing. After going to the cardiologist when Ali passed, and after six months of going every day to the hospital where I was feeding my husband, I was totally stressed out. I asked my doctor after Ali died, ‘Do you have anything now, a tranquilizer or anything to help?’”

“And he said, ‘Mally, if a 90 year old man dies, that’s natural, and if you are 42 years married to him, and you are sad, that’s natural.’ And it gave me so much to think about, that everything we are going through, even with the hurricane, it’s part of our environment.”

“We know this. We constantly have the warnings, but we aren’t taking them seriously. We have all these things around us. The good and the bad. Things that are good can have the opposite side. That’s everything in our life. If you let it go you can acknowledge the feeling that this is who I am at the moment. Yes, I have lost my husband; yes, I must get used to being alone; but then I have the other side. I have all kinds of good things. I have this freedom back to be totally alone. You must cling to that good side of the bad stuff to help you get into the next phase, which we all don’t know about, because you never know.”

A watershed experience came about following her 2019 trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, where she participated in the international exhibition, Sciarsism and Sciarsists. Once home in Naples, she incurred a terrible spine injury as the result of a fall. And after her first surgery, she was told that pain could become a permanent part of her life—she should just “paint postcards.” Not taking this advice lightly, Khorasantchi located a neurosurgeon who, with twelve hours of surgery, corrected her spine. And little by little, on a slow and steady journey, she healed. This experience led her to a search for her personal oasis. Locating a house sitting on a longago fishing camp, she shared her book, Roots —filled with the same colors and images evoking the nature surrounding the property—with the owner. Regardless of the many other bids he received, he chose to sell it to her.

So, she renovated it and here we are, looking at the raw beauty of a place frozen in time when, Southwest Florida had fishing cottages and personal estuaries. She now is building a larger studio on the property. She says, “I am sitting here thinking that I am the richest person in the world, and it came because I fell on my butt.”

It’s the dichotomy of things. “There is a reason for everything,” she says. “This is where I want to be.”

Early on she learned about accepting change through her son, who made the decision to come to the United States from Germany as a foreign exchange student following the passing of a good friend. He was determined to carve out a new story.

She shares that later, during a week-long stay at South Seas Plantation on Captiva with her husband Ali, “We both woke up in the night and we heard all these noises. The nights here are amazing. The animals, the wind. We thought, ‘Why do we sit on the other side of the world [Germany] with the rain and too many people?’ We both said, ‘Let’s do it and think about it later!” We bought a 1991 home in 1991 in Bay Colony, Naples, which was the third home built there at the time. Soon after, she and Ali carved out successful enterprises, he with Ali’s Oriental Rugs, and she with Merle Norman Cosmetics.” She’s been here 30 years and really is a Floridian.

From a place of anguish to where everything is going to be okay, it sounds like a theme that could resonate with painters, and Mally has words of advice. “I definitely do not see myself as a painter who needs to paint as if there is danger of the environment changing. I feel I am part of this, I am always changing. To change is part of our life in this world.”

“I am now 75. I was once 25 and every tree around us was once a little tree and now is a big tree, and it will die, and it will go and there will be more trees. There will be higher temperatures and it’s all natural. Every day is change. Nothing stays the same ever. Nothing.”

“So, we have to be careful. We have to be good to our world. We should not have these constant feelings of guilt that we should do this or that. We should have more feelings of care, of joy, and that is what will get us to the next stage. When I paint, I really hope that someone sees what I am thinking at that moment, whether there is some kind of peace, or joy that I bring into my paintings. And eventually there is a color or shape that talks to the other person that gets to their soul.”

Those who purchase a painting of Mally’s make the purchase because that piece resonates with them on some emotional, higher level. She has that gift. She wants to continue painting pieces that anyone could be able to own, even on the smaller scale; however, she also wants to paint even larger, more monumental canvases. “I really need to do big!” she laughs while turning to the canal. “Oh, look at that. They are here. This is the couple of the year,” she says pointing to two cream manatee bodies beneath the sugary brown water heading toward a bend in the canal.

“Good things are around you,” she says. With only what one sees within the frame, like looking at a landscape painting of this moment, the guessing of what is beyond the bend where the manatees go, or above where the osprey sees us so small, all can only be imagined. We only have the magic in front of us to witness.

Mally approaches her paintings like this: she says, also in reference to grieving, that working on moments in a piece, smaller areas of paint strokes, deliberate applications of her collage, focusing on one area, one task at a time, all take away from what can feel overwhelming if taken on as a painter—and as a widow—all at once.

Moving into a new season of her life now reflects what she places on her canvas, which is the beauty and discord, and pain and renewal of it all. “There are no horizontal lines or perspective to give order or focus,” she says of her paintings. She is inspired by the wildness yet order of nature. Only when something like a tree is snapped, do the lines look broken.

Just beyond sight through a snaky opening of a Night Blooming Flamingo cactus laced around a sable palm, an osprey sings to us below with a fresh catch in his claws. “He’s quite proud of what he’s got. That’s his job,” she says.

We walked from the dock to her newly cleaned and renovated studio cottage with empty plates full of pound cake crumbs. She has two painted canvases stacked on the floor, both so different in size and feeling, and in the background, with her paints and brushes set organized on a rolling table. Precious out-ofprint art books are stacked with pages rolled and damaged from the surge that flooded this place just a few months ago. Through her studio window, under the Spanish moss, an old yellow and blue John boat floats abandoned (for now) beside a shoreline of broken bamboo shoots, that will eventually regrow. Hurricanes and life are all part of change. Like Mally says, ‘“Whether we die, go, change, or the sun shines less, it’s all part of life. It’s natural to grieve. Nothing stays the same forever. Feeling joy and care gets us to the next stage.”

As the warm afternoon light waned and the estuary darkened, the canal cleared into a mirror of the foliage above. One small cream body made its way around the bend as if following her parents before the evening set in, before the other beasts come out for the night shift, and Mally returns to paint.

In Southwest Florida, Mally Khorasantchi’s work can be viewed at Harmon-Meek Gallery in Naples,

BIG ARTS on Sanibel and the Polk Museum in Lakeland, Florida.

Her paintings are in the permanent museum collections of The Baker Museum in Naples, Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Germany, the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow, and Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers.

A documentary film about Khorasachi, by Anna Honorata, The Story Behind the Painting, can be viewed at this year’s Fort Myers Film Festival in May, at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center in Fort Myers’ River District. Her book, Roots is available on Amazon.

Mally Khorasantchi is represented by the Harmon-Meek Gallery in Naples and the Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York City. • Paula Michele Wagoner is owner and designer of Broken Shell Studios. She grew up on Sanibel.