This
self-portrait was made from memory of Azar's face. She created this pencil drawing when she first came to the United States, while living in the Bay Area. Azar says she was thinking about her life and how everything had changed for her. She describes feeling "upside down", and has captured this mood in the lines and form of her own face.
How do you survive repeated social revolutions during your life time, when each upheaval affects every norm of personal conduct, social interaction and politics around you?
How do you survive displacement to a new country, which views the violence that you have just fled as the sole representation of you and your identity?
How do you explain to your children and grand children how you feel or who you are, when the country that you belong to no longer exists, except in your mind and is otherwise demonized?
Perhaps you endure in silence, and accept the human condition, as many do, or perhaps you rebel and seek another revolution. Or maybe you rebel a prolonged and silent rebellion.
Azar Paints.
She focuses on her experience of the moment. Sometimes, she is a fish out of water gasping for air, sometimes; she is a pear, or a flower breathing in the air. She releases and controls her emotions - through her brush strokes, at times volatile, at times in despair, and sometimes in an attempt to stay calm.
Lately she has been covering the canvas with people and places from far away... Clay walls lining sleepy village lanes in the heat of summer, hens and roosters roaming around the garden, an old man smoking his pipe in the shade, a goat waiting in the old bazaar, a little girl chasing balloons. These images surface from her memories and take to the canvas, telling tales of a world intensely intimate to her, but mostly unknown to the people around her.
Azar's art is personal. As a self taught artist, her work has grown out of her experience as an Iranian woman. Born and raised in. Tehran-Iran, she was always interested in visual arts, but began painting seriously in 1979 when the Islamic revolution drastically changed life as she knew it, and her children left home. During the tormented years that followed, painting was her sole means of self expression, which remained mostly a private affair.
In this period she mostly used elements of still-life as it was not possible for her as woman to venture outside the house to explore nature and open spaces.
After immigrating to California in 1986, Azar continues to explore her experience of displacement through her art. She has featured her work in a number of exhibitions in the Bay Area and Southern California and is the recipient of several awards.
