Source: Art of Iran, fifth issue, Esfand 1380 (March 2002)
Translated by: Roya Monajem

Note: As the original article is very long, the interview is presented as an extract of Parvaneh Etemadi's views. So it can also be called: "And Artist's Literal Expressions for a young painter."

To me art is an attitude. It is not technique. I never teach technique. I do art work and my job is creativity. The problem is that in the past, for example, in the fifteenth century, if somebody sent his son to for example to some David's atelier to learn painting from him, it was because he was interested in David's work. Ateliers are not art academies. Here we deal with one or few masters and not with the History of Art. Those who learn techniques are to me painting engineers. That is they know about academic rules and regulations of the art of painting and they have learnt that this is for example cross composition or triangular or square or...and they then paint them on the paper and turn into good painting manufacturers. However, they lack a personal mind. A painter or an artist is one whose emotions, feelings, spirituality, and physicality have been integrated into a single whole. In other words, together they form a complex. It is not possible to be a painter during daytime and go home at nights and beat one's wife. This two can not happen simultaneously. The painter unifies with all his/her problems. Painting is not a profession. You produce a commodity that is the only commodity capable of buying gold. All other commodities are compared to each other and are evaluated by gold. It is the only commodity that you can buy money with it and it goes beyond material evaluations. No doubt, that it should be like that and not how it is in the present mediocritized world of today when shop-keepering and many other things are confused with each other.

Every human being has a beauty and a beast within oneself. In fact Sufis sit on animal skin to represent their will to sit over their 'self' to keep an eye on their animal or beast within in order to control it. Humans can never be freed of their beast. They can only restrain it and become aware of it. That beast is the engine of our life. Without it we are incapable of living this material life and we die. Therefore this physical body consisting of flesh and bone is a beast and it is natural for it to behave like an animal. Anybody with a great beast, would definitely possess a great angel as well. And I have always said, 'how people only expect to see the beautiful part of others?' I personally want to see the other part as well and if the person lacks it, I would become suspicious. Beauty is born out of our beast and not out of our angel. I want to know your personal views on everything and would like to know what you personally think in this regard. I want to know what is your understanding of the world and how you define different phenomena. That is what makes life attractive and interesting. For only then I am not faced with a mask, but a human being who expresses his/her unique self.

The worlds that other painters have painted are their personal discovery and not mine. I have to "grind my own water in the mill." Creativity is a continuous phenomenon and it does not pause even for a second. It is an act of incessant discovery and invention. You discover with your feeling and invent with your brain and reason. Technique is your invention for manifesting that which you have discovered. You catch an idea in the space and you wish to show it to others too. You do not have any other alternative than revealing and materializing it in such a way so that others would be able see it too. And the acts that you carry out for the purpose of its representation, is your technique that should be personal.

The problem is that the question of art in our country suffers from a strange misunderstanding, because it is an imposed and imported entity, I mean the contemporary art. Art in the Orient is very different from art in the West.

Artists make only one work of art. That is why as soon as you see the work, you can say even from a long distance that it is for example, by Bahman Mohases or Sohrab Sepehri. I mean the work of those who are genuine artists. I mean the work of a painter who is capable of sudden unlearning of all that he/she has learnt with much hardship and abandon them. Painting has never accomplished anything through hardship, labor and effort. Art is in essence a form of recreational activity, otherwise it is not art at all. A work requiring labor and effort is industry, such as carpet-weaving when the weaver suffers and weaves and there is no discovery as such in it.

If we could say that the subject of study of a mathematician is quantity and quality and other mathematical concepts and that of a physician is human body and psyche, what could be said about the subject of study of a painter? To me the subject of study of an artist is space. That is why sculpture, painting, architecture, fashion design and similar activities are one and are called visual arts, because these individuals are all preoccupied with the question of space. To illustrate this point further let us take music as an example. Music is a combination of sound and silence and continuous sound. Continuous silence is not music. It is the musician's choice to combine a certain degree of sound with a certain degree of silence and this is what makes his music different. In the same way, it is up to the painter to choose how much of the space available should be filled and how much should be left empty. Good painting transcends its technique, that is you do not realize what the painter has worked with and it is the space itself that captures you first. It is only afterwards that you go to check the medium that the painter has worked with, whether it is water color or colored pencils.

Unfortunately, in Iran those who teach art see technique as the goal and that is why they start their training lessons with 'copying great works.' In other words, one should copy the life and the personal views of a so-called master, in order to learn if one could learn at all. For it took the master in question for example fifty years to paint in that way. And now you want to copy his works. That is impossible because you have to go back to the very first moment of his life when he started to paint and live with him breath to breath to see what he had eaten or which sceneries he had seen to reach such conclusions. Mere copying is wrong training and it kills that which embodies talent and discovery. Art has no formula, it is an exception. When it has formula it is not art, it is technique, something like carpet weaving. The history of art is full of exceptions and it never records repetitions. How is it possible to make a rule out of exceptions. This is the opposite of what we do.

The world of an artist is, unlike the world of ordinary people, a simple world. As I said there is a devil and an angel within me as they are in you, even though you might deny it. I don't and I am so proud of both and I always say that all these beauties originate from my beast and I am grateful to it. An artist is different from ordinary people in the sense that he/she is not educate-able and we in fact earn our bread from not being educate-able. Otherwise we would have been like 'good, virtuous' people, but we are not. One should learn how to ride over one's beast like a good horseman and force it to venture in order to reach beautiful results. These are the aspects that are fundamental to the development of the personality of an artist. In academies, one can not be 'bad' while I say 'one should be bad in the sense I explained above in order to accomplish what one wills.' Artists are in a way 'outsiders' of the customary society. Like gypsies, we are different creatures and the society has allowed us to be different, in fact we have forced it to accept us as different. If we were just like the rest, they could not accept us. That is why mediocre painters are not that much accepted, because they are like others, like the rest of the people of the society. They are polite, content, considerate, nice...It is enough to just glance through the history of art to see that there has not been a single 'good virtuous man' among the true artists, but we love them anyway. Look at the life of Picasso and his morality. He did all sort of 'bad' things, but he said 'when I enter my atelier, I take off my skin and flesh as one takes off one's shoes.'

To me Artists are the leaders of the society. I can not regard an individual who does not let go of his/her devil and does not acknowledge it, as an artist. There are excellent carpet weavers who produce first class carpets worthy of going into the best museums of the world. But in their conversations they talk about very petty things because they are not discoverer and inventors. In relation to Iranian painting and miniature, one of the things that has always annoyed me is that exception happens very rarely and it is always what it used to be and nobody jumps out of its boundaries in a sudden stroke. Somebody just changes the colors slightly and it takes two hundred years for miniature painting to be just a little bit different. There appeared only one exception, Reza Abaasi who drew a portrait negligent of the rules and formulae of miniature painting. Artisans and Artists are different. We have not had a true artist in the domain of visual arts. All our intelligent individuals who possessed a mind of their own person have always been drawn to Literature.

We have not had a force consisting of individuals with their individual minds always in the process of invention and discovery. This is a trend imposed on us after the Constitutional Revolution (mashrouteh) and after Kamal-ol-molk. We were forced to establish institutes similar to our oil company, i.e. conventional schools, universities and... and change into mere consumers. Since then, we indulged ourselves in Western mode of creativity. Painting can not be a profession and professional relations have no meaning here. Each artist is a country in him/herself and is the king of that country and can not put up with his/her neighbor as the other one is also the king of his country. It does not make any difference for me to work in Iran or elsewhere. I want to work here because when I work outside, my painting is beautiful and blooms, but it has no perfume. Any sensitive and artistic individual belongs to the soil of the society, he/she has grown from. There is a flower called snowdrop (in Persian it is called hasrat, or envy) that appears during March. It is like small white tulips with a slight shade of purple. Sepehri talks about it too (eruption of snowdrops from the soil). It is a flower that grows nearly everywhere in the world, but it is only in some specific soils that it develops a pleasant scent that we call saffron. If we take the same flower and take it to London, it will grow there and will produce perhaps even better flowers, but it will not have any scent.

The works of an artist will have their own fate. They will live their own independent lives. If we look carefully into the laws of Nature, we would see that Nature is all poetry and we can learn whatever we need from it. And it is possible to change and transform it. We are like caterpillars. And caterpillars do not philosophize about what they do, but they are programmed to do them. That is as soon as the first buds of white mulberry trees appear, they hatch from their eggs and they should hatch just on time, otherwise they can not survive. We are born to take whatever is accessible to us and put it into our mouth and chew it in order to transform it to something else. This is our nature. Caterpillars do not go to see the work of other caterpillars that has perhaps been transformed to a beautiful silk dress. It lives as it lives, eating and eating and eating and growing until its physical growth has reached the required limit. It then sleeps and weaves a pupa and the day it leaves this pupa, it does not eat or sleep, but only share love and die.

... Payvand News - 4/30/02 ... --