Parastoo is a contemporary artist living in the heart of Wiltshire. Born in Iran, and the granddaughter of a celebrated Iranian artist, she has drawn much inspiration from her childhood memories of his studio and paintings.
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She is known for her evocative landscapes and elegant still life pieces, Parastoo’s paintings are powerful expressions of feeling and imagination.
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"Roses are the protagonists in my painterly plays and they are the main derive of my subjectivism.
For me painting roses is the best way to express what I might call my own peculiar deep feelings about life.
The impact of my paintings is determined by the tension between the figure’s physical presence and the spatial flatness of the setting, between realism and abstraction, between impression and expression.
The figures are forcefully defined and positioned comely and three- dimensionally in a setting free of other details; the aim is to achieve maximum of splendour with minimum effort.
Roses in my paintings are portrayed some with backs turned, some in profile, some three quarterly and some in full face, seems they are engaged in some ceremonial rituals, demanding the viewers attention.
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The bright light gives colours an almost transparent quality that reveal their sensuality and let the petals dance freely in the air, the background merge in a distribution of colours and the landscape transformed into abstraction of pattern, their monumentality and majesty derive from simplification of an artistic strategy.
My paintings are portrayals of the ephemeral unknown, whose exuberant moment of its short life, is shared with mine.
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What really concerns me above else is expression. Expression for me is not merely a question of passion that might be visible, it is the entirety of the painting of the figures with space around them, the whole contributes. The tension may still remain unresolved but the whole productive.
I am sure Monet had taken up the same with his paintings of water lilies."
