Unlikely Masters

"I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk round it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting."

Jackson Pollock

The quote says it all and as you can see in my studio there are three artworks in the process, two on the floor, one on my work desk. I never used easels to this day and rarely painted as the artwork was against the wall giving me a front view.

Watching the creating process of two great painters shaped this idea in my mind, Jackson Pollock and Manouchehr Yektai.

Both living in New York in 1950s and 1960s in the Abstract Expressionist dominant atmosphere and the New York School in painting and poetry.

Jackson Pollock painting above the artwork.

People can sort out many influences in my artworks but Pollock is not a common guess.

Mostly, viewers with conservative art taste who prefer figurative approach even start talking about how they admire my style because it's not like "those" abstract paintings and that "those" is not in a pleasant tone.

But as soon as I declare Pollock (and many other abstract artists, Rothko is my number 1 for sure) as one of my masters, they are confused.

In Pollock's case, not only the unique working from above style, but also the interewoven process (not just a simple habit, emphasis on "interwoven") with listening to music (for Pollock, Jazz music) was what we had in common. Gonna explain this part in another post sometime.

Manouchehr Yektai always painted like this.

Seems uncomfortable?

Yektai was Iranian-born like me and lived in a same era as Pollock and was a poet too.

His abstract style contains some poetically painted figures and his poetry lives in an abstract realm. The way he painted definitely caused a recognizable aura in his canvases. It was like reinventing still life paintings with a pollock touch and impasto white tones. Feels like the scene is coming out of the floor to reality.

To me with a total figurative style of using lines and a more abstract choices of using colors, learning to always watch from above, caused a perfect way to create the most important part of my works, the haphazard lighting. Pieces of light spread over the objects, bodies and architecture of the scene, causing a sense of moving in colors and escape a clear light source.

Sitting in front of the painting, the upper part and the below part of the frame create an unconscious different coloring and contrast plan, but seeing from above makes the surface like a whole area, leading to a better potential for freestyling just like the masters mentioned above. That "...be in the painting" and creating a sense of poetic relation (escaping the logical phase) between the objects and lines helped me achieve the balance I needed in my scenes, thanks to both of my unlikely masters.