This article originally appeared in the Tuesday, Nov 27, 2007 edition of the Lincoln Journal Star.

By CINDY LANGE-KUBICK / Lincoln Journal Star

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The artist painted iconic images.

Symbols.

A powerful lion.

Two women, representing beauty and inspiration.

The wise man who stood for learning.

Faridun Zoda explains the 8-by-10-foot panels mounted on the side of an old brick-and-stucco building on Ninth Street.

In the second of four panels, a group of students wearing clothing from their homelands sits in front of a slender man in a cowboy shirt, holding a book.

“I could feel that very well,” Zoda says, “because I was one of them, sitting there in class.”

The 49-year-old became a Lincoln Literacy Council student after he came to the United States in 1994, an artist from Tajikistan, a war-torn country that no longer valued art or life.

The organization gave him a gift.

And when he painted “The Lamp of Literacy,” he wanted to show how that gift changes people’s lives.

“I wanted to connect knowledge to education and to culture,” he says.

“Without language, it is impossible to do anything.”

He had studied English while attending art schools in Moscow, but he never used it. As time passed, he forgot it.

And so he came to Lincoln with only a few words.

His learning started with a wise man.

A man holding a book in a mural on Ninth Street.

n n n

The farmer from Henderson knocked on Faridun Zoda’s front door on a spring day.

David Quiring believed in giving back, and the only thing he loved more than working the land was reading, so it made sense he would become an English tutor.

He had been teaching for a few years when he arrived at his new student’s home.

Zoda ushered him into his studio for their first lesson.

Paintings of women, some of them nude, rested on easels and against walls.

Oh, my, thought the Mennonite who was raised in a strict Christian home.

He asked about the paintings.

When you are an artist, you have to learn to paint the naked form, his student said in broken English.

Studying the human body is a basic part of developing as an artist.

The tutor began to teach in that studio.

He built on the basics.

“I stayed with him for two or three years,” says Quiring, 76. “He was a good learner.”

And the farmer was a good teacher.

“It’s just a gift to society, this kind of person,” his former student says.

“He goes to other countries to teach English. All the time he is helping people.”

The hours they spent together learning turned into friendship.

Zoda came to his tutor’s farm sale and painted the scene.

The picture hangs in Quiring’s home office.

He painted sandhill cranes in a cornfield, the Platte River, trees just beginning to green.

The picture hangs in Quiring’s living room.

The tutor owns several of his former student’s paintings.

But no naked women.

“As time went on, he began to paint other pictures,” the farmer says, laughing. “And I encouraged him in that.”

n n n

The council unveiled the mural on a Friday afternoon in November. The mayor was there.

The idea for an art project came from a former LLC director who wrote grants to fund Zoda’s work. Quiring also supported the project financially.

The panels are mounted on the north side of the building, where thousands of southbound commuters can see them.

It was Zoda’s idea to make them portable, in case the council ever moves.

He has shown his art in Russia and Syria, Lebanon and South America. In 2000, his paintings were exhibited on the walls of the United Nations building in New York.

He makes a living as an artist, speaking English, the “business language,” he calls it, understood almost everywhere.

This mural represents what literacy does for societies, he says, and for the people who learn.

In the four panels, the painted people move from classrooms into the world, becoming contributing members of society.

When the mural was unveiled, he explained his vision to the crowd. He thanked the council and his teacher.

A few weeks later, the tutor posed with the artist in front of the mural.

A slender man in a cowboy shirt and glasses, the mirror image of the man in the painting.

When Quiring met the painter, they had nothing in common except that he wanted to teach and Zoda wanted to learn.

They learned a lot from one other, he says.

He points to the symbols in the mural, talking like an artist.

“Remember, this mural is really in honor of the 250 or so tutors we have here in Lincoln,” he says.

“It isn’t just me.”

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.

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