Ali Banisadr Quotes

Sometimes I forget what I put in. I want to capture things in that way, where you’re looking into your memory, a dream or hallucination. The characters become a mixture of archetypes, [and] that’s what I like. You’re trying to figure it out and your brain wants to categorize things, but it can’t because of this motion. You want to solve the problem, but it never gets solved. It’s like when you read a really good book and the story never leaves you.

Say someone tells me their name – that name can turn into a taste or a color and that’s how I categorize it in my mind. It’s an easy way of categorizing things.

Painting is a way of thinking visually, so whatever is happening with me at the time gets reflected in the work.

People quickly look through things and don’t sit and experience. That’s a problem with artwork, [because] it’s more of an experience than something to quickly look at. It takes a while for everything to unveil itself.

My work makes people understand things in a visual way that I could never understand in a literal way – like the way you deal with and break down problems, and don’t come up with answers, but [find] a pathway that becomes clearer.

When I am working on a painting, everything that I am thinking about at the time – be it current events, the books I am reading, personal events, influences, emotions, etc. – all find their way into my work.

Painting is a slow process; it takes time to get there, you learn little by little and always want the next painting to be better than the last. For me, success is about this, seeing the slow progress in my work.

I like to zoom out of the situation so I can see it all and don’t get caught up in the little things down there.

I sometimes say the conflict in the work is the conflict of my own thoughts and anxieties. It’s a civil war in my head. The top part [of my artwork] is you letting go and floating. You become part of the air and you’ve tapped into the heartbeat of the universe. I guess that’s what people do when they meditate.

As I work day after day, inspirations from different places go into the work. It’s combination, but it’s also comparative. I’ll be reading two books at the same time that are totally different [and] then have two stories mix together.