My formative years as a realist painter in college put me at odds with the prevailing views of the time concerning painting. Realism was thought to be dead. Anyone who pursued painting recognizable imagery was labeled a hack or worse. At best I was tolerated. At worst, ignored. Though defensive and insecure, I was undeterred in my passion for illusionism and narrative in painting. In the intervening years, the resurgence of realism, its embrace by a younger generation, and a generally more eclectic art world are wonderful developments!

My work comments on the built environment, its ephemerality, and the impact of man and his policies, politics, and polemics. For all the strength engineered into buildings, they are quite fragile, and it is this dual nature that often provides context for my work. My interest in architecture—modern architecture in particular— stems from the discipline’s attention to material, especially the move from traditional building materials like wood and brick to nontraditional materials such as glass and steel. My own work references these modern building materials, but does so by subverting them.

In my new drawings, I use imagery from ancient Greek and Roman tales, particularly the trials of Hercules, and weave a new mythology with myself as the center. The symbols become something completely new in this context, but continue to recall goddesses, monsters, and mortals struggling for survival, power, and a place in the world. As a self-portraitist, I am tracing my struggles with identity, trying on new ones. I am a beast, a savior, a nurturer, frightened and then frightening.

My creative process revolves around my cultural experiences and observations as an Iranian immigrant. I create mixed-media paintings on Mylar that are visual essays on hybridized Iranian and American cultural identities. These paintings are a fusion of references to historical Persian miniature painting, contemporary Iranian social and political imagery, and the visual codes of Western abstraction.

My gouache-on-found-paper paintings are based on photographic explorations of the ephemeral landscape: places where water meets land, where fallen trees are swallowed by their reflection, where the horizon dissolves into sky. These sculptural, stitchedtogether surfaces, with their layers of painting and drawing, are like the palimpsests I seek in the landscape: the strata of meaning and experience in a specific place.

My inspiration comes from old pictures and stories, daydreams and fascinations. I play with the scale of things, combine what we actually see with what the mind sees, mix up night with day and now with then. I'm always looking for odd juxtapositions. Could we live shoulder to shoulder with Lilliputian societies? Could ships ply the roads and skies? Maybe birds should drive. It's idiosyncratic, but it's what I've always been about.