Artist Statement

I layer oil paint in a process of intuitive exploration, eschewing description in search of a resonating vibration. I am influenced by French modernism, and my time studying at Stanford in the 1970s with the Bay Area painters Frank Lobdell and Nathan Oliviera. Decades of living between the Bay Area and south of France are apparent in my sense of light and radiating color.

I draw inspiration from my Persian ancestry and certain childhood artifacts such as a Persian paisley tablecloth, which has reappeared for decades in my work, eventually becoming the “Persian Paisley” series. 

In my recent “Ecstatic Still Life” series, painted during the solitude of the pandemic, I use staccato-like strokes to create a reality where patterns and forms dance in a rhythmic movement.  In other work the forms become purely geometrical blocks of color and line pulsating together.  

Richard Newlin, author of Richard Diebenkorn: Works on Paper, has written about her work:

“Reza’s best work brings a Pacific Coast land’s end luminism together with Zen transcendentalism in a meditative, saturated and deeply personal vision…. Studied in the French origins of modernism and conditioned by the Western sublime tradition of the San Francisco Bay Area, Reza’s paintings are epigrams of intelligence and grace.”