Roshan Houshmand

www.roshanhoushmand.com

Artist Statment

As an Iranian-American woman artist who has lived and traveled the world extensively, painting has been my way to understand, question, resolve and explore life. My art is about change, evolution, process, intuition and awareness. My main influences include Cezanne, Miro, Klee, Picasso, Bleckner and Marden, as well as physics, anthropology and relationships.

This series of paintings was originally inspired by images of particle trails from bubble chambers from Brookhaven National Laboratory and CERN which I discovered after attending a lecture on theoretical physics by Brian Greene, and my ensuing research on the topic.

The simple elegance of the trails of the particle events, and the incredible information each trail provides, intrigued me both visually and conceptually. After many studies, I began applying the “invisible” imagery in my work, and the conceptual theories to my life. The idea of visual markings in art being autobiographical codes by the artist, each mark created being an event in itself leading to a creative process of allowing the painting to happen without a conscious need to be in control.

Inasmuch as experiences are unique and cannot be repeated, the relationships of form and content, dark and light, the positive and the negative inspire synchronous progression. The exploration of color and form as a metaphor for emotions, via an organically cumulative process, crystallizes fragmentation into a visual “truth”, based on the formal values of western art. It is the spiritual acting in mysterious ways, which empowers my work with a meaningful sense of soul, and an intelligent sense of coherence. The underlying force behind my art and my life is change. The concept of multiple layers, hidden and revealed, reflects states of change, in that every event in the visible world is the effect of an “image”, as in Plato’s notion of idea.

Each layer addresses emotion, spirit and intellect, markings corresponding with incidents of life experienced, only to be covered by another experience, ritualistic in process, tactile in sense, and visual in perception. Displacement has inspired my reconsideration of relationships between and within art and life, between material and process, form and content.

In science and in art, sublime process and our observations change the inherent nature of the matter, the energy and the process itself. Although these works were inspired by particle events, each painting is an event in itself.