At eight or nine, he took a piece of charcoal and wrote on an alley wall: “If you want to know me, follow this line.” He drew the line in twists and turns, along one alley and into the next, until he suddenly found himself in an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Lost, he began to cry. He thought he could follow his line home, but it had become so tangled that he could no longer find his way.

Learning to see

I began school at Razi Primary School during Reza Shah’s reign. My secondary-school years coincided with the war and the events of September 1941. Afterwards, I entered Tehran’s Faculty of Fine Arts, which had been modelled on the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Its library was a window onto the outside world. In its books we encountered modern painters, from Van Gogh and Gauguin to the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, Picasso, Braque and others. Their work raised many questions for us. There was fertile ground for exploration and new ideas.

I cannot remember exactly when I graduated. If I am not mistaken, by 1960 I had finished my studies and travelled to America with a group of textbook authors, because I illustrated schoolbooks. After returning to Iran, I held an exhibition at the faculty. That led to an invitation to teach drawing part-time, to architecture and sculpture students. Becoming a drawing teacher was decisive for me.

As a student, I had already found work in advertising as a graphic artist. At that time, a fine-arts student might paint a good portrait or work in oils, but would not necessarily know how to meet the advertising industry’s graphic needs with ink and paper. I was one of the few working in that field. I also became involved in a major textbook project with Zaman Zamani, another fine-arts graduate who was a few years older than me. Together we undertook the painting and illustration of schoolbooks.

A material that chose me

It was not really I who went looking for a style; the style chose me. While teaching architecture students to draw, I took them in the faculty bus to places such as the Bam Citadel and Kashan. They drew the earthen and adobe buildings. For five years I kept looking at those landscapes. Eventually, I painted them directly onto kahgel, a mixture of earth and straw. That was how my kahgel paintings began. I exhibited them at Seyhoun Gallery, and I have continued using this material ever since.

In the early years, the kahgel would crumble. Even when I fixed metal lath to a board and covered it with a centimetre of earth before painting, it remained vulnerable. Eventually, with the help of polymers, I was able to make the work lighter, larger and more durable.

I have used kahgel in different ways. For a time, I worked in a highly realistic manner. Now I am drawn to a minimal approach: saying very little, expressing the subject with two lines and two adobe bricks.

The moment of making

I am one of those unfortunate painters whose mind starts painting something else while the brush is working on the canvas. There is a good side to that: the mind is so active that, even when one painting is ready to be made, another is already taking shape. But it is also a serious difficulty. If I put aside the work I have planned and follow what my mind demands—what is probably my emotional need at that moment—what happens to the painting for which I had a particular purpose and may have spent a month making studies? Sometimes I follow that inner desire. Sometimes I tell it to wait and continue with the work in hand.

There is one principle in painting to which I remain faithful: the painter must know when to put down the brush. If you keep trying to improve a painting, you can make it worse and worse. A moment comes when the canvas has had enough colour, and you must stop. Whether the result is good or bad, it belongs to that particular moment in time. What matters is your state of mind and feeling at the moment of creation. Those feelings change; taste and sensibility develop. All of that is reflected in the work.

Alongside Iran’s nomads

While working with the anthropology department on a museum devoted to nomadic life at Saadabad, I painted nomadic saddle covers and kilims. Only then did I really notice their beautiful geometry and recognise this territory as a subject for painting. I stayed home for an entire year and worked on nomadic life, producing a series called Alongside Iran’s Nomads, which was exhibited at Ketabsara.

The response was considerable. UNICEF reproduced some works as postcards. At UNICEF’s suggestion, one was issued as a United Nations stamp. Again, I had not simply chosen the nomads as a subject: life had brought me into contact with them. Ghereh, the carpet magazine published in Italy, also devoted a special feature to me, reproducing and introducing some of the work. The series therefore reached audiences beyond Iran.

Later, I realised that these paintings told the story of an academically trained painter standing outside, watching how nomadic people travelled and lived. There was too much distance between us. I thought it would be more honest to work from within the community, to put myself in a nomadic person’s place and see their own account of that life.

I had seen extraordinary gabbehs: with a simple visual language and without the restrictive rules of perspective, their makers pictured an entire world. Why should I not do the same? In a new period of work, I moved imaginatively inside that world and set aside the constraints of academic painting. I looked closely at gabbehs and drew on a book by a Danish researcher about their imagery. I painted as though the pictures themselves were a kind of gabbeh.

A wall for peace

An American conceptual artist had undertaken an important project around the time the Berlin Wall came down. As that wall was falling, she was building a low wall of peace and art. Artists from both sides were given ceramic tiles on which to leave an image, a poem or a message. The project drew considerable attention: a wall expressing peace was being made by the artistic and intellectual communities on either side.

A friend introduced me to her as a painter from Iran, from the Middle East. She welcomed me and invited me to leave something from my own country on the wall. I painted a simple black-and-white image on a ceramic tile, since I was unfamiliar with ceramic colours: two lovers, one giving the other a flower. But the frame of this simple, modern miniature was broken by a bomb that had entered their world. I explained that our literary history speaks of peace, friendship, love and kindness, yet at that moment we were caught in war. A bomb from Iraq had shattered that harmony.

A poetic spirit

Identity takes shape and changes through history. I have often thought about the phrase “the Iranian spirit.” What does it mean? My own interpretation is that it is a poetic spirit. An Iranian person does not have to study literature at university or be an important poet to be drawn to poetry.

You might walk down the street and see a pickup truck with the words “You cannot rewrite destiny” painted on the back. In Persian, the phrase plays on sarnevesht, destiny, and az sar nevesht, writing anew. I do not think it is a quotation from some great sage; the driver has written it. Look at the beautiful architecture of those words. Or listen to the rhythmic calls of street vendors selling cucumbers with blossoms still attached. We have all seen verses on the backs of trucks, written by drivers who may have had little formal schooling. That is why I say there is a poetic disposition in Iranian life, among the learned and ordinary people alike.

An elegy for my father

When my father died, during his burial I heard the sound of hundreds of violin bows in my ears. He had loved the violin. The sound stayed with me throughout the funeral. When we returned home, I told my wife that I wanted a violin. She was astonished: what use could I have for one while mourning my father? I could not find one at first, but a relative who played in the symphony orchestra helped. Violins were being imported from Russia at the time; somehow, we obtained one. I wrapped the actual violin in a shroud and buried it in the work. Beneath it I wrote An Elegy for My Father. A photograph appears in my book.

This was the beginning of a way of thinking about working directly with objects. There is no need to take up a palette, arrange your colours and paint a picture of a violin. That does not mean painting it is wrong. You first have to understand what you want to say. If the work expresses that intention, it is sufficient.

Another work of this kind was a clock, shown in a gallery in Madrid. It was an homage to Lorca and to “At five in the afternoon.” I removed the clock’s components, wrapped them in white cloth, made them bloodied and wounded, and put them back inside. Beneath it I wrote Homage to Lorca. Spanish visitors understood the reference as they passed. A work can be simple, yet difficult to achieve, and communicate through a contemporary form.

The person who looked

When I was a young secondary-school student, a man named Seyed Ali lived in my grandfather’s house. He was a village man from near Arak who worked as a labourer in Tehran. After my grandfather died, he came to live with us. He remained even after my parents’ deaths and helped with the household. Sometimes I would see him go into the sitting room, gaze at my paintings for long minutes, and then return to his work. I wondered what held his attention so deeply.

I have held many exhibitions and seen all kinds of visitors: elegantly dressed and perfumed people who walked around, chatted, showed off and professed to know about art, then left. I never saw some of them spend even a minute looking closely at a painting. I still think Seyed Ali was the best viewer my work ever had.

Those who come after us

At my age, one’s attention turns towards those who will come after. I want to know what the young people who remind me of my own youth think and feel, what interests them, what they think about painting and how they see the world.

I have always cared deeply about this. I firmly believe that the world does not end with us. Others are coming; I can hear their footsteps. They will shape the future.