The Mirandas of Loutolim have lived in the same small area on the north bank of the Zuari River for more than five hundred years. They were the Sardesais or revenue collectors of a small village called Raciem when Goa was ruled by the Bijapur Sultans. They were Hindus and Brahmins by caste. When, in the mid 16th century, the Salcette district was conquered by the Portuguese, the family converted to Roman Catholic Christianity and took on their new name, Miranda.

The house is in Loutolim, in the district of Salcette. Loutolim is small, sleepy and redolent of the flavour of a much older Goa. The center and heart of Loutolim is the church, and within a dog's bark of it, is this house.

It is approached by a lane, pink, because it has been hewn out of the crumbly laterite stone which forms the soil of India's western seaboard. The lane ends up before a wrought-iron gate set in a low wall. And beyond the wall, looms the house foursquare and white, as though sitting for its portrait to be painted or more likely, for tourists' cameras to flash.

Facing the gateway and set to one side of its frontage is a portico embellished with baronial flourishes complete with a heraldic crest engraved on a tablet which is set into its masonry. A couple of steps through the portico lead to a solid wooden door of extravagant dimensions. As you are trying to locate the doorbell you become aware of a tremendous clamour within the house: of several dogs barking furiously and human voices, both male and female, shouting orders.

The door is open and there stands the owner of the house, Mario Miranda.

He is above average height, well set, with skin the colour of weathered teakwood. He has plentiful hair, tousled, dark-brown and flecked with gray. His eyebrows are straight and thick. He has a prominent nose, a firm chin and soft-brown eyes, widely set. He is dressed in an open necked shirt and cotton trousers. His stance, head thrust slightly forward and shoulders hunched, reminds you of a boxer's crouch. His face breaks into a smile as though he is really pleased to see you, even if, as is quite likely, he has been dragged away from his work-table: for he is a busy man and like most artists who work at home, has no fixed working hours.

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SuZ was born in New Jersey, and moved to the "Wild West" of Idaho at the tender age of two. She grew up on the banks of the Snake River in Homedale, Idaho, not far from the Owyhee Mountains. From the juniper and sagebrush covered Owyhees, to the beautiful Sawtooth Range, the whole family camped, hiked, fished and developed an appreciation for the beauty of nature. It was inspiration.

Some of her work..






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Salvador Dali Biography

b. May 11, 1904, Figueras, Spain
d. Jan. 23, 1989, Figueras

Beginnings
As an art student in Madrid and Barcelona, Dalí assimilated a vast number of artistic styles and displayed unusual technical facility as a painter. In the late 1920s, two events brought about the development of his mature artistic style:

• His discovery of Sigmund Freud's writings on the erotic
significance of subconscious imagery; and
• His affiliation with the Paris Surrealists, a group of artists
and writers who sought to establish the "greater
reality" of man's subconscious over his reason.

Surrealism
To bring up images from his subconscious mind, Dalí began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as “paranoiac critical.” Once Dalí hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist.

He depicted a dream world in which commonplace objects are juxtaposed, deformed, or otherwise metamorphosed in a bizarre and irrational fashion. Dalí portrayed these objects in meticulous, almost painfully realistic detail and usually placed them within bleak, sunlit landscapes that were reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland.

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Each letter in every script known to man holds an eternal power, an individual beauty in its vertical, horizontal,
angular lines, in their continuity. I have made efforts to bring forth calligraphy not only as art form but a expressive
medium where letters in all their nakedness become alive, vibrating, pulsating with its inherent, shape, giving
a canvas space to your thoughts, a meaning to the sounds & actions.

Be it Devnagri or the English scripts, a constant thirst for knowledge and passion for perfection continues to give a
special meaning to my quest in Calligraphy. Even today I say, that I have just begun the journey towards my destination
and I still have a long way to go.

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