My oeuvre springs from a lifelong fascination with the nuances of experience, the meaning of existence, and the diverse cultural mores that vivify our shared existence. In my artworks, I explore life’s myriad relationships, incorporating insights from my rich Persian cultural heritage,sojourns around the world, and many years of life in the US. Multilayered insights, both simple and complex, arise unexpectedly from influences as diverse as the mystical Persian poet Rumi to the American painter Edward Hopper.
During my wide-ranging cross-national sojourns from East to West, I interacted with and painted people in bazaars, concert halls, and studios, among other settings. I explored the crisscrossing and interlacing of the visual, literary, and performing arts, which are brought together in some of my figurative and representational paintings. Working from life or en plein air allows me to reveal what is seen as well as to allude to the unseen. Even in my landscapes and seascapes, I seek to stir the viewer’s imagination. While roads without pedestrians and boats without passengers can be lonely places, they can also be places of possibility, reverie, and reflection.
In my paintings, whether figurative, portraits, landscapes, or still life, I seek to evoke lucid narratives, narratives left only partially explicated with the understanding that it is the viewer who closes – or lifts ever higher – the circle of the narrative. This encounter between the artwork, its myriad implications, and the viewer can spark unanticipated, improbable, and intriguing associations. I think of my works as arising from a unique gestalt that, through the interplay of light and color, infuses each painting with visual and emotional significance, which take the viewer into a world – a world that is at once of, and yet not of, the viewer – that goes well beyond the painting. The artworks transcend everyday life even while paying tribute to the beauty of our fleeting existence, the compositional and conceptual levels intertwined.