I spent a period reading mythology, not only Iranian myths but those of other cultures, especially Egypt. Their meanings, faces and signs became important to me: horses, ears of wheat and the ways such forms were represented.

Drawing and a continuous history

To arrive at the particular forms in my portraits of women, I drew every day for thirty-five years. In the works I am discussing here, the line moves freely: the brush touches the canvas and a body or a form is drawn without correction. This brings my work close to the practice of qalamgiri, the controlled delineation of forms in Iranian painting.

Comparing Matisse with Iranian painters, particularly those of the Shiraz school, can reveal affinities in palette, flowers, fabrics and brushwork. Visual possibilities are taken up and transformed from one period to another. I think of the entire history of art as a continuous river.

Change rather than progress

Art changes; it does not progress in the way medicine, law or the making of tools can progress. In those fields, a new stage may remedy the shortcomings of an earlier one. In art, change is where creativity and discovery become visible.

Who can say that Michelangelo’s David is better than the reliefs at Naqsh-e Rostam, or that Hafez is better than Goethe, Ferdowsi better than Homer? The same difficulty arises when comparing cultures or centuries. A work of art either exists as art or it does not, whether it is on a cave wall or hanging in a museum.

We cannot simply call Picasso more advanced than the paintings on the pottery of Sialk. Art continues to change with different people, times and circumstances, but that does not establish a hierarchy of progress.

A vocabulary of images

The subjects in my paintings attract me first through their visual structure, although their meanings matter too. I call them words: a vocabulary with which I paint.

The woman is the most important of these words. A woman or a man appears as a sign of the human being. Around that presence are forms I love, forms that have belonged to my life or meant something to me at a particular moment: wheat, wildflowers, horses, goats, roosters, doves and grapes. Fish and pomegranates also enter this vocabulary. Their visual qualities and their place in my experience are inseparable.

Style and the limits of words

For me, what matters is the work itself. An artistic event passes through different periods, and its possibilities are carried into later ones. Calling a face Iranian on the basis of a fixed set of features raises a question: which features, when Iranian communities themselves are so varied?

I am wary of claims of ownership that arise from narrow definitions of style. When we speak about a painting, we translate a visual structure into words. That translation is also where misunderstandings about painting begin.

Cultures in conversation

Because we do not know large parts of our own past, we sometimes rediscover them through the West. I do not regard that as a bad thing. I believe in the continuous intermingling of cultures. They seek one another, absorb one another and remain alive through that exchange.

Signs encountered in Iranian mythology can also be found in Greek mythology. Classical subjects return in later art, including Picasso’s engagement with Greek forms, bodies and clothing.

The highly simplified animal forms on Marlik pottery show a profound understanding of visual structure. For that reason, I see no necessary contradiction between modernism and our painting traditions.

Modernism and cultural memory

Modernism began in Europe, and in painting particularly in France, but it drew enormously on other cultures. Japan, Africa, Iran and the Indigenous cultures of the Americas all contributed to that transformation. Art circulates. What matters is understanding the artistic language of your own time and being able to speak through it.

I believe in a collective cultural memory: something of your history, language and culture remains with you, whether or not you have consciously studied it. Learning can deepen that awareness, but an Iranian quality may emerge even when national identity is not your stated concern.

Consider Nima’s poetry. Its forms differ radically from the ghazal and the qasida, and it engages with French poetry, yet it remains recognizably Iranian. You can sense its mountains, the Caspian Sea and the shore.

The face beyond a passing expression

In a portrait, I prefer a sense of timelessness to a face that expresses a particular, passing emotion. The faces I paint are not identifiable people from the street. Their social position is unclear, and one cannot easily decide whether they are happy, sad or absorbed in thought.

They do not declare an emotional state. I find a related quality in the history of Iranian painting and sculpture: faces that are not crying, shouting or displaying an immediate earthly delight. They occupy a dignified, silent condition that I regard as one of the qualities of the classical.

Colour and light

There are two ways of thinking about colour and light in painting. A painter can add light to the surface, often in oil painting, gradually bringing lighter colours forward. Or the painter can draw light out from within the painting, as though it were already present in the canvas.

Some of the works I discuss in this interview follow the second approach. My attention is less on light as a material effect than on the luminous structure of colour. Rather than simply naming a colour, the viewer may recognize the light within it.

The memory of a colour

A desert memory might lead me to ochre. In summer, the mountains north of Tehran can have that colour; at particular hours, the Caspian Sea offers blues and greys. Colours begin in observations of nature and remain in our minds.

Yet we cannot always know why we choose a particular colour for a particular painting. Its meeting with form can happen without a fully conscious explanation. Each work is a distinct event whose emergence we do not entirely understand.

Spontaneity and preparation

The line changes with the brush you hold. But spontaneity becomes possible only after you have acquired the necessary abilities. That sudden, apparently unplanned moment depends on technical preparation. Freedom in execution is supported by the work that came before it.

The two-dimensional surface

I question the need to create an illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface, or to treat linear perspective as the natural aim of painting. A distant object appears smaller, but it has not actually become smaller. We know that corresponding sides of a table are equal, yet perspective makes the farther edge shorter.

Iranian miniature painting does not rely on a single vanishing point. This is not a lack of knowledge. Space can be organized through successive levels: we see the foreground, the inside of a room, the roof, the hills behind a house and the soldiers upon them.

Such painting rests on knowledge as much as on eyesight. A figure in the distance may have eyes and eyebrows as carefully drawn as those of a figure in the foreground, although ordinary vision would blur those details. These are two different visual logics and two different aesthetics.

Perspective should not be mistaken for the sole measure of visual ability. I believe painting should remain faithful to being a two-dimensional art.