Gallery Pages
Email the artist:
inspire(at) anahid(dot)com
to inquire about the artworks.
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About the Artist...
Anahid is a San Francisco-based artist, born in Iran of Armenian origin. She lived and exhibited in the famous historic Goodman Building, an artist's community in San Francisco, in the early eighties. After painting on her own for over a decade, she went back to school in the mid-eighties to get her degree at the San Francisco Art Institute and studied with Carlos Villa and Bruce McGaw among others. She graduated with a BFA in 1988.
Her work has been shown and published since 1978. She embraces a style that can be called mystical realism&emdash;art that comes from the spirit, exploring the dream universe of the soul.
Artist's Statement:
My work is inspired by nature and tempered by my own experiences. I see artmaking as a yoga, union with the spirit. I work intuitively, from the heart, not from the head. Instead of logically planning out a painting, I let the painting tell me what it wants to be. This way art becomes a process of discovery and self-knowlege. My love of nature plays a big part in my art.
Sometimes I have a vision of a painting that I can't get out of my head unless I draw it; I might make several drawings for a painting. Other times I start by looking at a photo I took while hiking.... Other times, I start right on the canvas without any plans and go with the flow, and images present themselves to me as I'm working on the composition. It is fun watching the canvas coming alive and creating itself. My assemblages always grow intuitively, without preconceived ideas, but piece by piece. They sit and 'cook' in the studio while I'm working on other paintings.
I love vibrant colors and mysterious shapes and use them to express things that words cannot express. I ask the viewer to suspend his/her judgment instead of trying to put the art in a category as we often do: abstract or representational, etc. etc. to just explore with their eyes and feelings and see what the painting evokes in them. Sometimes people see their own familiar shapes in them.
I work in two distinct mediums: painting and mixed-media assemblage. My assemblages are mostly made of found objects, boxes filled with an array of images and objects found during my daily life. In these times of wasteful consumerism, I feel good about using some found objects to make art.
This page last updated August, 2010