| Artezan.com is dedicated to creating and sharing a web of useful decorative painting resources and nurturing a productive network with decorative artists around the world. It is owned, developed and managed by Rohaizan Sallehudin.
Rohaizan was a career woman and led a busy corporate executive life - although she had always been interested in the creative arts and crafts and dabbled in a bit of everything, she never could commit the time to pursue anything seriously. She eventually gave up the corporate life to run her own management consulting firm and that was when she finally found time. She joined a folk art and decorative painting class a friend had organized with a US-trained teacher. The rest is, as they say, history!
Nothing had got her quite as hooked as folk art and decorative painting. She painted and she painted. And she painted! On whatever she could get her hands on. And wherever she could – at classes, at seminars and workshops with teachers from Australia, the US and Canada, and mostly on her own. She started teaching folk art at the weekends from her home studio in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in response to friends’ requests.
In 1999, frustrated at the lack of information about decorative painting on the internet, she decided to put together everything she had learnt about folk art and decorative painting into a website and Artezan.com was launched as Malaysia's first website on decorative painting. Over the years, Artezan.com has been visited by decorative artists of all levels – from beginners and those who are interested but somehow have not yet gotten round to painting, to teachers and very experienced decorative artists from all over the world.
Rohaizan has painted and taught decorative painting not only in Malaysia and now, Kuwait, but also in the UK (2000 - 2001) and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (2002 - 2003) where her husband’s career took them. Other than her regular decorative painting classes, Rohaizan also gives talks on decorative painting to the expatriate community, and holds workshops on various traditional and contemporary styles including zhostovo, intarsian painting and stroke roses.
Rohaizan is Malaysian and is an Economics graduate with a Masters in Business Administration. She is married to Javier Rashad Sanchez and they live in Salwa, Kuwait where Rashad now works. They have a 25 year-old son, Danial, who lives and works in Malaysia.
|
