"A Time For Dreamers" . book about the Art and the Artist in the 80's and 90's

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"A Time For Dreamers"
by Nilofar Mehrin

my book on sale on Amazon


“The Poet” mixed media collage, 1990

I was talking to a friend, who painted and was a teacher at an American university in Florence. He was a web designer and had done many websites for artists he knew. He had seen my studio and my cards1 and said, “Why don’t you write a story to go with your cards?” I had always wanted to write such a story, but I didn’t think real life would allow me any flights of the imagination. That’s why I thought about writing about the times I lived in.

I have always wondered about art meaning different things in different countries. As an example of recent successful

1 The inshallah cards are reproductions of water colours and acrylic paintings. I sold these in shops from 1998-2013.

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Living Art As A Work in Progress

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artists, I have been thinking about Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst’s art, because they represent my generation. I want to talk about who I am by talking about their work, the ones that are important to me. Two pieces, the ‘Unmade Bed’ and the ‘Camping Tent’ are both on my list, and these two made me reflect on the personal dimension we associate with them. I identify with the human warmth and vulnerability of these.

Perhaps the ideal is the intimate heart feelings which are expressed in poetry and art, but one wonders if these have anything to do with the more materialistic dimension; is it the dichotomy between body and soul? I remember reading a quote from Heine, the German poet, where he said that he had pleasure looking at a person’s face without wanting to possess them. However, he knew that he was an exception to the rule, and that generally people are interested in copulating and reproducing themselves, and some call that “love”.

Personal feelings sometimes do express themselves in acts of copulation. It seems to me that from the 90s onwards, the “genital” has been the “only” interesting event in an individual’s life. Inexplicably, people’s sexuality has come out of prudish attitudes and has become a public domain. In society many are seen to be clutching, scratching , touching or indicating their private parts in a trendy, “must do” style.

On the other hand, there is another artist who I am interested in and who became successful in these decades. Damien Hirst is best known for his animal sections suspended in formaldehyde. His work made art and science seem one and the same thing. The cold scientific dimension is detached and formal. Awe inspiring nature was put in a show case, and humbled the spectator by putting him in his place as a mammal, which demonstrated that humans have the same machine parts inside of them as the other species. Being a religious minded person, I identify with these works of art and see them as a celebration of the hand of God; the supreme intelligence.

I first thought about writing when I read my grandfather’s books. He was a historian, an expert in antiquity and Persia, and although he had had an adventurous life travelling the

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world over, his books were very difficult to read. I saw a lot of him when I was a child and he would talk about the things that had happened in his life. I always wondered why he didn’t write about them, because those were the things which I was most interested in. I wanted to know about the feelings involved, the whys and the wherefores, rather than listen to his lessons in history.

Like Tracy Emin’s ‘Tent’, in my writing and in my art2 – however humble it may be – I want to say that I shared moments of my life with many people. Feelings for friends and relatives filled my days and my decisions. The times I lived in included a common history, shared with a lot of other individuals who were walking the earth at the same time as myself. As in the past centuries, when the world was not yet a “village”, I would presume to think of Madame de Stael and other women writers who travelled and wrote about the times they lived in. Mine is not a testimony to the things which I have seen and felt – it is more a looking back on the events.

I would certainly not have bought a ticket to go to Italy if there hadn’t been the Iran/Iraq3 war in the 80s, or had I been born in my aunts’ generation. Being Asian and from a Muslim family, I was born in Iran during the Shah’s time, when women were wearing Western clothes. Even then, being a woman meant family ties and duties were utmost on the list of priorities. As role models, my father’s sisters, my aunts Homa – who worked as a nurse – and Tahmeen – who was an office worker – had travelled to Europe after the Second World War, they were from a generation which was still oppressed by womanhood and the duties it entailed.

The older generation in my father’s family had been brought up in India by their Iraqi mother who lived in Purdah,

2 My view of sentiments expressed is certainly traditional and prudish but I realise Tracy Emin is expressing a general mood in her art which belongs to the Western experience. 3 In my opinion The Iran/Iraq war in the beginning of the eighties made the arms trade very happy and also some nationalists who wrongly believed in establishing an age old belief in the Aryan racial superiority. It was tailor made in order to destroy both countries.

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and later had moved to Iran. They had arrived in Tehran in the 1950s, and even though they worked, they were looking after their ailing father, and Parveen their sister, who perhaps suffered from autism, an ailment which had not been discovered yet.

With a lot of luck, I was born in times when I could afford to have time to myself for some years. Both my mother and her sister and their families were living in relative comfort, and as modern women. They managed to have a life which belonged to them, even if they had a family and were raising children. My mother had had a journalistic career and had written for the Tehran English Daily papers. She had an MA in English, having studied in India. She and my father had both been translators, and were intellectually alive. The younger generation too had had a university education; my cousins Ameneh and Sadieh who were born in Pakistan had degrees, and were women who were working. They were positive role models.

In Iranian society, having time to yourself for a woman was never considered to be a positive thing. That was the difference with my relatives in the subcontinent. The ideal Iranian woman had to be serving the children and everyone else in the family, and had to always be there for other people. Even now, ‘most women’ have no time to dwell on ideas and want to get on with their day-to-day lives, and they thrive as consumers. As a born Iranian, I was destined to be influenced by the history and culture of my country in the 60s, and the seventies during the reign of the Shah. One of the main productions of this time was a weekly periodical called Ketabe Hafteh (‘The Book of the Week’), in which one could read translations of literary pieces from various countries and times. There were also articles about world art and culture.

Even though Iranians are very involved in their own literature, back then, the times were allowing many Western and Eastern ideas in. Like many other Asians, Iranians, both men and women, are brought up “trained” to have to shoulder much responsibility in the home, especially with the sick and the elderly. Even the middle classes work hard in the house,

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and are not like the middle classes elsewhere, who usually can afford to have help in the house and therefore have time to spend on their interests.

The home I was brought up in was totally strange according to the usual Iranian mentality, because at home the men, usually my father, cooked the meals. It would be unheard of for an Iranian husband to cook and prepare the meals, but my parents lived this way and my father would often tell me not to tell anyone about it, as he knew it would be an issue with everybody outside our home. My mother was a capable business woman. She was good at negotiating and pulling off deals. This was mostly because she was allowed to have self- confidence, and due to necessity she used her talents. Her sister, who had married a Pakistani and went to live in the UK, was very much the same type.

This was the background which made my case a special one, and I would describe my art to be a mixture of various cultures which have influenced me. I was born and bought up in Iran/Tehran, where I lived from 1959 to 1977. In 1978 I discovered London, staying with my mother’s brother Ismile and his Swedish wife Ylva. Even as a child I spent some years in London with them. I went to the local primary and secondary schools along with my cousins. Some holidays were spent with my family in Karachi. These were different influences, and my family has given me a varied cultural background.

I have always been interested in expressing my own ideas. Even as a child, I would insist on not copying reality but saying something new which was on my mind. Sometimes I would produce bigger pieces, which were totally from my own imagination – I mean, not having copied from any source. This made one point of discord, with a lot of people who thought that copying reality was necessary.

One person at the foundation course4 in London which I went to in 1980, who was a photographer, told me that the Persian miniatures themselves were the artworks of people

4 Saint Martin’s School of Art Foundation course

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who had looked at reality closely and studied plants, objects, buildings and people in order to produce their own pictures. In other words, art was a language and one needed to know the words – i.e. arts and words were images from reality, and you had to learn them in order to then put them together to express an idea.

Fortunately, my own tutor Janet, who was a painter, was not hung up on such ideas. She said that she started to paint one day by simply putting all sorts of objects on the kitchen table and painting them because she had the urge to do it. I thought it a much more liberating and fun point of view. There was heart and emotion in the idea of doing things the way she did. It was a personal research, with her interest in life as the motivation and the engine. It meant that one could pick out the objects and things that one loved, put them on a table, and paint them. The important thing for her was that one should work, work, work, and the more you did this, the better. Working seriously for yourself was good, and if you were honest with yourself, you were going in the right direction.

In fact, Janet’s pictures were so much of herself and very intimate. I thought it was kind of her to tell the young people who she taught that they should work hard at what interested them. After the foundation course, I was going to study further, but then the times had changed, and even though I had a chance to study in an art polytechnic, I couldn’t pay for it. This was because of the revolution in Iran and then the Iraq/Iran war, which had begun in 1981-82.

When the revolution broke out, I had gone to Pakistan to visit my parents. I had not been able to return to England because when I returned to attend my course in Cambridge, I was held at the airport and sent back with the excuse that in my diary I had expressed the wish to stay on in London, where I had already spent three years. It just happened that people like me, totally out of the reality of events in Tehran, were now victims of what Iranian “revolutionaries” – mostly have nots – decided to do back home. They had decided to get into the American Embassy grounds, which I thought seemed pretty

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unnecessary for them to do. I had to go back to my parents who were visiting family in Pakistan and Karachi. I spent and stayed a year in Karachi, living with my mother and her sister.

My Aunt Jahan’s house in Karachi was very much a social hub, and was lots of fun and alive. My aunt and her daughter, my cousin Ameneh, were very socially active and great cooks. They would have lunches and dinners, and went to parties which made life lively and full of different interesting people. Through one of my aunt’s friends there, I was introduced to an employment and worked at a graphic agency as an assistant. I was twenty one, and even though my parents wanted to see me settled down, my own dream was to get an education in Europe.

My mother had studied and was teaching English, and I thought that perhaps a degree in art wasn’t really good enough for getting a practical paying job. She herself hadn’t wanted me to go to an art school.

My parents had been born and brought up in India, in the Persian community which had lived there for several generations. They were brought up in Bangalore and Mysore, whereas my grandfather from my father’s side had been born and brought up in Hyderabad by his Irani parents, and my mother’s father had been a Shirazi, but had a history in Egypt and Iraq.

It seems that in their days, people could get on a horse or carriage and travel all over Asia without having to have specific papers5. I have this idea because of my grandfather’s stories about how he had travelled from India to Iraq and back many times. He had actually started out from Hyderabad and worked on a ship taking tea to Japan when he was eighteen. From there, he had travelled to Europe and then to the United States. He then became a student in a university in the US, and lived there for a while. He even survived the earthquake in 1906 in California, and came back to Iraq to marry his first

5 Perhaps as President Putin suggested (I read in the papers) an Asian Union of countries, following the example of the European Union, could be our dream for a future peaceful Middle East and a source of prosperity for all Asian countries. Amen!

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cousin, who was a girl brought up in Purdah and from a wealthy family. He took her and the children to India, where he was teaching Persian History and Literature at the University in Mysore.

Now, at twenty-two in Karachi, I had decided that I wanted to go back to Europe. My mother thought that I would get married to someone or the other in the family. She wasn’t really in control and my father wasn’t that interested in controlling my life. I had spent days in London where I was not sure about my future. I thought that I would have to change too much in order to be “a modern woman” if I integrated with the English way of life. It seemed to be too complicated, and I had always the idea that Italy was closer to my heart emotionally speaking. Even the language seemed to open doors of a different kind of modernity, as it were.

The summer of 1982, I was on a plane to Perugia and heading for the Universita per Straineri, where I stayed and studied Italian for three months. Then, since Florence seemed to be a smaller place than Rome – I couldn’t handle living in a metropolis like London without family – and it was famous for art. I packed my bags again and went to a printing studio to see how etchings were made. I had seen these beautiful etchings in and around Russell Square where I went to school in London, and I wanted to make some myself, but the technique stood in my way of immediate expression.

In 1983, I got a job and started living with Dona, a girl who studied at an American university and was a photographer. I shared a flat with her in Via Maggio, and started working as a salesperson.

In 1984 I put my name down for a course at the university in order to study English Language and Literature. I didn’t know Italian well enough, but I was living and learning.

Later in 1984, I had moved to Via Bolognese and was living with a group of young students. In 1985, I moved to Via delle Cinque Giornate with Peter, who was a German friend, then a PHD student, and his girlfriend Caterina.

I had gotten to know my fiancé Guido in Rome in 1983 and wanted to get married. My twenties were flying by and I

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was aspiring to art, as always, but not getting much done, since I had to make a living as a salesperson.

From 1984 to 1989, I was beginning to paint big pictures in Via delle Cinque Giornate. Peter had gone back to Germany and now I sub-rented the rooms to other students and worked as a salesperson in the summer. The apartments I had lived in had always meant so much to me, and in this last one I lived for fifteen years, renting out the extra rooms to other students.

At university I was getting along, slowly learning the Italian language. It was very hard. Guido had been a great help after I failed to get through the first exam at university. He made it a point to help me get through the first exams. He had become my personal trainer, but I found it very hard to study, because when I studied books, I would want to paint as well, and I was very much distracted by the different directions that these two interests took me. On one hand, I had to have a fixed timetable in order to study, and on the other hand, I needed to get the ideas out on paper or canvas and give them a structure.

My cousin Ameneh, who was a journalist and working for a newspaper, came to visit me from Pakistan and asked, “why didn’t you continue going to an art School and study art?” Why was I studying literature when I loved to make pictures? The answer was that I was not confident of being an artist, but I had these ideas that would push me to spend money on canvas and paint. I would collect a lot of art material for the times when I had the moments of high energy, and I would paint when I was emotionally stressed out. It was a sort of discipline. I even refused to get angry and fight for a relationship, and I would take my energies to the canvas.

It seemed that the people I had in my life never listened to me. I mean, I hadn’t a voice and I found that was a problem in almost every sphere of my life. I suppose women only find a voice and people listen to them only if they have a tough man on their side like my mother had, or if they have children or a tough personality. I kept on asking the men in my life to get married and they would only come round to doing it after several years had passed.

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My mother had had a strong voice of authority because she was a first child, and being very bright, everyone gave her a lot of attention. Even Ameneh was like her. Everyone listened to them. I hadn’t managed to learn to have a similar voice. Perhaps I wasn’t a fighter, and she was more aggressive and competitive. I was most of the time struggling with myself, trying to get myself under control. I think that it had something to do with being very physical. I mean, I felt that I had an athletic constitution.

I was really vigorous, and yet I wanted to have a brain and to be an intellectual like my parents. I hated being in a woman’s body. A female, whose God given role in life was to reproduce. I thought it was really humiliating to be a woman because women always seemed to be second class, like myself. They never achieved a voice until they had children, but I wanted to have respect effortlessly. I wanted people to listen to what I had to say, but they didn’t.

I suppose it’s normal to ask for things and not get them when you want them. I have come to think that the world is pretty much like that – unless you are lucky or you put a gun to people’s head, you get to be second class. Even when I had been living in England and I asked my cousin if he wanted to get married, he said he wasn’t ready because he was a student. I thought, I wish I could save him from being so far from his own culture. I wanted to save myself too. I thought that he was missing out on his Iranian and Pakistani cultural roots, but he didn’t see it that way and, of course, I was wrong in my traditional mentality. It was like a story from a Jane Austen novel. Later on in life I saw the film ‘West is West’6 and it made me realise the emotional distances and the work that has to be done before it would have all worked out according to how I saw things.

I was stupid enough to ask him if he wanted to get married

6 The British comedy directed by Andy De Emmony, 2010 is a film about a Pakistani who has two families, one in Punjab and one in Britain. This film is about the cultural misunderstandings and the solutions which eventually evolve out of the interactions between the people involved. It is very much relevant to my own background.

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and later on, my aunt – his mother – told me that women are not supposed to ask and that they are supposed to wait until they are asked. And much later, about thirty years later, she told me that he had had many Indian and Pakistani families who were after him for their daughters.

I was only a woman who wanted to express all the things I couldn’t handle like other women: like Emin’s bed and tent, I was finding my way through relationships and I also needed to be an artist rather than want to get a marriage. Practical visa and stay permit concerns plus my own traditional upbringing made me have to propose to people myself! As an educated and modern woman, my mother’s solution was surprising; she suggested that I could throw myself at the feet of one of her rich relatives and plead to him to marry me because all I really owned was my virginity.

I still think it couldn’t have been her saying such a thing to her twenty-one year old daughter. She was probably worried about what people would say!

However, later on when I met Guido in Italy, I was crying for ages about what had happened to me and the humiliation that I had put myself through by asking my cousin that stupid question. And that is why in Islam, parents have to take responsibility to marry off their children. No one can twist your arm and make you do the right thing – most of the time, one has to make decisions oneself. It is the negotiation part that I find so difficult. My mother and my aunt were both good at negotiating, whereas I’ve always been totally at loss for words. Guido was the eldest son of a lawyer, and he was very articulate. He would want to talk relentlessly at times. Once I had learnt the language, we would get into these conversations which were very funny and exhilarating, and that is when I realised that it is the spiritual thing of wanting to communicate. I never dreamed of meeting a man who would want to talk to me! But I suppose most men, even the ones that want to talk, usually have difficulty in listening to women.

Which brings me back to the subject of art and expression. I suppose art for me was all those things that I wanted to say,

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and I was making an effort to make myself listened to. But I think the first thing that I would tell people is that if you use art as a message to mankind, then use it wisely. I know that if you are a black person or a woman or gay, you have always been at a disadvantage because, only the man with “the gun” or “the power of words” has been able to put his foot down and has had the last word. It seems that is what this world is all about. But art too is a powerful instrument. I read an interview with the German film director Fassbinder some years ago. In this, he stated that even though he was from the same angry generation as the Bader-Meinhoff and he knew them, he had chosen a different path in order to express his opinions through the films he made. I thought that was very intelligent.

Most of my life I’ve seen that only “power” has a voice. Perhaps having a voice, is powerful too. You can say something and be heard in art. That’s the beauty of the thing. And your message has to be a good one...

I started to make the Inshallah cards in 1989 and1990. Then, in 1992, I managed to get my degree in English Language and Literature from Florence University. I was having shows and exhibits in and around Florence. I loved to go to Venice and the carnival there, and later on I did some watercolours on Venice, which is a beautiful city and a constant source of inspiration.

In 1998, I had to leave the apartment7 where I had lived for fifteen years. With help from friends and well-wishers I managed to get a studio in the centre of Florence, and I started to sell my watercolours to the public. My watercolours were about the city were I had lived for the past twenty years, and the sitting rooms and interiors I painted were a dream of finding a stable home.

I was trying to live on my art, producing a lot of watercolours, cards and boxes. My clients were mostly tourists. I lived in the same place upstairs. My studio was in a back street in the centre and I was living like a hermit with lots

7 The via delle cinque giornate street (which translates to The Five days of Milan), was the apartment belonging to Mr. Quercioli, which me and my friends rented in 1984, it is where I lived for 15 years.

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of cats, who I loved. I couldn’t make money and pay the rent after 2001, but I paid my assistants to come and help me produce in quantity. I really had no business sense at all, so in a frustrating way I helped a competitor who had been watching me to take over my sphere of sales, i.e. the shop I was selling in. This person who does admirable etchings became very successful in selling his art because, out of feelings of solidarity with artists, I had shared my own distributor with him. Finding that his machine produced work took over my hand made one and out of naivety I lost a very important source of income.

In 2001 shops closed down and I had to leave the studio. In 2004, I spent some time in Viareggio and in 2005 in the spring, I went back to Iran, to my mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. I decided to buy property in Dubai, and in 2007 I rented a house in Dubai for one year. I continued to paint in Tehran, and had the help of young students and assistants who worked for me in my home studio.

My story is far from a success story – if anything I am probably the anti-heroine in the novel who did everything wrong. However, I think it is a story which shows a generation who aspired to create a new voice; one which is neither Eastern nor Western, but in the middle of the crossroads. According to President Angela Merkel, the multicultural society hasn’t worked out in Germany – and probably she meant Europe – but people like me believe that it is a new project and it has to be given time. The painting ‘Existence’ or ‘The Contact’ is about reaching out to get to know the other.

Perhaps in Asia, where many different tribes live together, you can see this voice; it is there in many Indian and Pakistani films. The Middle East is something different and more complex. Israel and its creation marks all the Muslims; it is a nation born out of European mistakes, and brings suffering to the rest of the Middle Eastern people. Will it ever be able to integrate – i.e. make friends with – its neighbours, or will it take over all of the Middle East through Zionistic pressure groups? My painting ‘Energies and Tendencies’ is talking about a mutation in geographical terms.

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In 2008, I fell victim to anonymous security people who didn’t allow me to buy property and move to Dubai. All through the new century, the new world order has wanted to take our voice away from us. This sense of being made into “puppets on a string” is in the painting ‘J’aillais me donner’.

I associate my science fiction planetary paintings with the more detached and scientific part of my imagination. Planetary science can be a refuge from our imperfect lives on earth. We have to live in the shelter of our buildings and sitting rooms and bedrooms, and even though there are now six billion of us on the planet, our emotional lives hinder us from finding solutions to problems. Today we are worried about resources.

While spirituality teaches us that resources are infinite if we aspire to higher values, the materialistic view limits our potential to find new solutions. It is the difference between Chairman Mao and Churchill’s way of dealing with the food problem. While the latter called for an increase in positive individual participation to cultivate and grow food, the former took for granted that some were going to be victims of the famine anyway. Just as today, some believe that nature is bound to get destroyed anyway. Here I would like to mention and pay tribute to the millions of people – some say 45, but I imagine the number to be higher – who died in the famine during the recent years in China, due to a lack of interest and energy in trying to save them. The melting down of the glaciers will happen, polar bears and other animals will die of starvation and climate change will inevitably change our planet and our life for the worse.

One aspires towards higher things, but will we ever manage to pull ourselves up and do the right thing? None of us is finding a solution to the problems, and the reason is that we lack the imagination to find and implement new ideas to the vital issues which are decisive for the future of the planet. Meanwhile, we will be scratching our genitals, and hiding our heads in the sand, being totally irresponsible and decadent. Like puppets on a string, we leave our destiny to God, and to the powers that be.

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Dialogue Watercolour, 1988

My Uncle Ismile had been living in the UK in London ever since he was eighteen, until he died in 1999 or thereabouts when he was sixty-three. He was born in Bangalore like my mother, but he considered himself a Pakistani rather than Persian.

He was important in my life because I stayed with him and his wife Ylva for three years when I went to study in England in 1979. I was just out of high school, having taken my last exam for my diploma. Having finished high school at eighteen,

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Staying with my Uncle and Aunt in London

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I looked forward to going to England and staying with them in London.

My mother was his elder sister of about 10 years, and as her family had accepted to keep me at school in London with them even when I had been a child. Now she asked him to help her get me into university in Britain. I was always a very dull, uniformed young thing with no one to guide me. I was more than happy to escape the university entrance exams in Tehran as they seemed a barrier which seemed impossible for me to overcome.

The Persian carpet Oil on canvas, 2008

I had been an absolutely useless student, mediocre by all definitions at high school. The only subject that I was good at was English because as a child, I had been sent to stay with my Auntie Jahan and her three children. My Uncle Ismile and his wife Ylva lived together with my Auntie Jahan in the southeast of London, in a semi-detached house. Later they moved to a house which they renovated themselves. They were very different from us Iranians as they did a lot of DIY and enjoyed it.

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The highlight of my high school in Iran, was when I once did a synopsis of the book 1984, introducing George Orwell to my seventeen year old class mates. I suppose I am still happy about that, because a lot of other students were proud of their maths and science exams, and I usually never excelled in anything. However, having gone to primary school in the UK as a kid, my English was pretty good and then it is true, that my mother, God bless her soul, tried to get me interested in the subject of books and novels by telling me the stories of these, and that is how I was introduced to the stories of Shakespeare and other authors.

She was an English Literature MA from Bangalore University and she loved books herself. Her efforts – whatever little effort she put in teaching me – were fruitful and even later on in life, I followed her on that path, being too afraid of risking a useless degree in art. That is what my Mother thought because we were ignorant of the fact that art was an important subject. Here I want to tell everybody that a degree in art can be as useful as any other. My Uncle Ismile had heard his fair share of stories too, because he was my mother’s youngest brother and she tried to get him to study with the same methods.

The sitting room looking on to the river Arno Watercolour, 2007

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I had always been a plain girl, whereas my Pakistani cousins Ameneh and Atefeh, with whom I stayed with in London, were much more interesting and brilliant girls. Everyone was always talking about them. What they did and said, was of the utmost importance. They were special perhaps because their father had died and also because Auntie Jahan and her Brother and his wife genuinely liked to communicate with children and judged them to be above average.

My aunt and uncle and Ylva, my uncle’s Swedish wife, thought the world of Ameneh, the eldest child. She was truly the star on top of the Christmas tree. People would have thought that she was some sort of a genius in the making. My uncle, they say, was pretty much obsessed with her when she had been a teenager, and he hadn’t allowed my aunt to bring up her children in the Islamic Pakistani tradition. The girls had pretty much a British type of education and upbringing.

In 1979, when I arrived at their home with my mother when I was eighteen, my cousins weren’t living there. Ameneh was at Brighton University studying science, and Farid was at Swansea. Sadly, Atefeh had passed away in Pak/Karachi at the age of sixteen from an unidentified illness. She had fallen into a coma and died. Atefeh had gone to Karachi to live with her mother and go to school there.

Atefeh had been my childhood friend. We were very different; she was seemingly shy and retiring and looked very feminine, and liked all the girly things. She loved to dress up and to look pretty, she liked to write and had lots of friends. When in Karachi we would all go to the bazaar in the old part of town to buy glass bangles and nice materials to give to the tailor. It was very exciting to be with my cousins because they knew so many people and were always involved. We visited jewellery stores with our mothers. We weren’t really that interested in the gold ourselves, but the older generation bought it with the idea that gold would always come in handy one day.

Once I was invited with her to a school friend’s house and we went to this party where all the girls and boys were sixteen

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like us, and we had to stay the night because it got very late. I woke up early with the call for prayer and even though I didn’t pray regularly, I felt I had to pray. I couldn’t think of something to cover up with so I used a bed sheet, putting it over my head and as I was praying. Naturally someone in the house woke up to go to the loo and in the dark they saw this sheet moving on its own. There was a low frightened scream because they thought I was a ghost.

That happened some months before Atefeh went into a coma. It was probably some kind of sign. We had had such good times together when some months earlier she and her family had come to Tehran. They had driven from London, travelling across Eastern Europe and Turkey all the way in an old green Peugeot. My aunt had bought it second hand in London.

It was the summer of 1976, and when they arrived at our old house, everything seemed just perfect...

Just some months before she passed away, we had spent some memorable evenings on the rooftop of my old house in Tehran. In those years, people still slept in the open air, on the rooftops in the summer. The beds would be laid out in the cool evenings and by nighttime they were deliciously cool and fresh to sleep in. We were both sixteen and slept close to each other. We watched the stars and talked and giggled until we fell asleep. Even then we had noticed the red planet and we didn’t know it was the planet Mars, which would soon descend upon the country.

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The night of the Angels Oil on canvas, 1988

Uncle Ismile and Auntie Ylva were a nice middle aged couple, who were dreaming of their pension years when I went to stay with them. It was because of Ylva’s Swedish influence that they lived a very methodic and organised kind of life. Ylva was generous enough to see her husband go back to university at forty.

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Al Noor Oil on canvas, 1987

He got his degree in economics and was then able to teach at high school. They were both teachers, going to work every day. They would come home, cook the evening meal and we would eat together at the table, where my uncle talked politics and me and my aunt kept quiet, only because we didn’t really care one way or the other.

I had been enrolled in a crash course, studying three A- levels in order to pass them in one year. No one told me that it was an impossible task for someone who wasn’t a real studying maniac.

However, I plodded along to Great Russell Street every day to the University Tutorial College and would spend the

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lunch hour at the British Museum. Of course I didn’t get through the exams as I should have.

My Time Mixed media, 1989

Whereas the Iranian students and the other Indian and Pakistani students who had taken languages or Maths for their subjects passed and were accepted into university by the end of two years study, I only managed to get a pass for English and Biology in my A levels, and I had spent a lot of time painting.

I am grateful to my uncle for allowing me to try going to art school. It was my own choice, and that’s what I really

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wanted to do in the first place but hadn’t had the courage in that direction. So I came home to my uncle one day and said I had enrolled at Saint Martin’s on a foundation course and I was going to try to get a degree in art.

I suppose people knew that I liked drawing and painting, as I had always done those things when I should have been studying for my exams. That year at Saint Martin’s was a good year. I had finally found my place and was happy to go on studying art.

Going to Italy was the result of my wanting to study and to get a degree. I hadn’t managed to do it in England. Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Government in 1981 brought about the rise in costs to attend university, and the revolution in Iran meant that I didn’t have the money.

The last time I met my uncle and aunt in Florence, they were both older, in their sixties and enjoying their pensions. Now they had all the time in the world to travel in Europe as they had always wanted to do. The first thing that we did when they got off the train that came from Milan airport, La Malpensa, was naturally to go to a coffee shop and get a cappuccino.

My Uncle still had a lot of his thick white hair, with the exception of a bald patch that he was getting at the back of his head. Auntie Ylva was looking very old and tired.

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Joseph’s Dream Oil on canvas, 1988

Not working hadn’t made their life more pleasant for them. I had always been very grateful to them both for their support and friendship, and so I was sad to see them unhappy even as pensioners.

My aunt wore a hard expression because of the problems that she had had to face in her life. Now my uncle wasn’t well, and she had to look after him and nurse him. He also had a girlfriend that he had introduced to the family; it was none of my business in the first place, but his choice rocked my conservative view of life. It hadn’t happened in our family that anyone should take a 2nd wife, but I know it happens all the time... I mean divorces and other relationships happen all the

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time and are in the normal way of life for everyone. There was something wrong or right with families who remained the same all through. My parents pulled through fifty years of marriage and were an exception to the rule.

This ‘other woman’ happened to be an eighteen year old, one of his students and from East Germany. This story reminded me of a film called Icelandic Wedding, where a young girl marries the teacher and accepts the fact that each one has a life of their own. She does not expect too much of the institution called marriage. Whereas the 1st wife chooses to die because she finds that he is never there for her and that she has lost him somewhere along the years.

My grandmother as a child (Saheb Soltan) and her sister

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These two people were now sitting in front of me in the coffee shop in the Piazza della Stazione. I could feel that they were really lonely and lost, and as if they were both in need of an adult person to look after them.

My uncle had always been a sort of leftist-secular liberal who didn’t believe in religion and he never talked about God. In fact, God didn’t come into his vocabulary at all.

Whereas his father, Mr Namazie, who was a Shirazi, was a very religious minded Shia, and he was brought up in the Holy city of Kazemain. He used to spend most of his time praying and reading the Holy Koran, and not much time at his business making money in Bangalore where he lived with his wife Mrs Saheb-Soltan Shustari, daughter of a Mullah. Their three sons had all taken a dislike to religion and wanted to be modern and practical, and they were secular.

My uncle, being the youngest of the five children, was very down to earth and wanted to get things done. Getting organised and living in the world’s reality meant everything to him. All he talked about were political subjects. One of his favorite topics at the dinner table was what the German Nazis did during the war in Europe. He would repeat that the Holocaust of the Jewish people included, aside from the six million Jews, other people as well. He would go on and on, saying that we all must be responsible people, doing our bit for society, contributing to society and so forth.

I learnt a lot of Communist jargon from his dinner time monologues. He wasn’t Islamic at all; only once did he mention God, and that was when one summer I was going out a lot without telling him where I was going. I only went to museums in London, but once I ventured out to France, to Paris, to see a high school friend who was staying there. That time he said that God had created the planets according to a plan so that they went round their orbits with regular precision, and that’s why the worlds that God had created were all interconnected and worked according to these precise and reliable movements, which were eternal and relied upon each other, moving in orbits destined by him. As in Sureh Al Rahman no 5.

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Pulsar Watercolour, 1990

His wife Ylva humoured his political sermons. Nobody, excepting Aunt Jahan and myself and her daughter Ameneh, remembers what he said in his repetitions of the same concepts. My aunt remembered them because she was mischievously making fun of him when he wasn’t around. It was such a relief to see that someone didn’t take him seriously! Auntie Ylva and myself, who were intimidated by him, used to listen patiently at lunch and dinner. His voice of male authority didn’t encourage anyone else to get a word in. Sometimes my aunt use to try and get a bourgeois table discussion off the ground. She would say, “wasn’t it true that this happened in history?” Just something to liven up the monologue. When she did speak, she highlighted his words by her wavering and indecisive manner. He was the one in charge, and his words were somehow unique and nothing could be said to match their importance.

I used to wonder at him, since my father and brother never tried to prove anything to anyone. In fact, nobody I knew was

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so self-absorbed as he was. Especially his standing up for the Jewish people in our Palestinian suffering region.

The Germans had always been morally beaten down after the Second World War. They were portrayed as terrible humans; people who heartlessly helped the Fuhrer to be the dictator that he was. Hollywood and all English productions on the subject of the war have always been full of propaganda which we all know well. However, in Iran and the Arab countries, Germans had always been looked up to because they were known to be so efficient, unlike ourselves, they were disciplined, capable and neutral.

For other reasons we liked the Germans and thought that they were more tolerant towards us in the Middle East than most of the ‘white men’ and their civilisations. They were involved in other issues with other nations, and that was reassuring for a lot of people. Being reliable, clear minded and straightforward and sincere and not very friendly, made these people seem more acceptable.

The Israeli war on the Palestinians, the plight of the Arabs and their homelessness, was what he should have been talking about and what he did say about the subject was unrealistic. He said that if all the Arabs got united, there wouldn’t be room for “the state of apartheid” in the Middle East. But we all knew that this was not a solution and that it would never happen. The future would probably allow the state of Israel to survive and flourish – the injustice to the Palestinians was obvious and inevitable and nobody could do anything about it. Only a miracle could save the Palestinians and the Middle East from this, and a miracle was nowhere in sight.

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The Blue Apartment in 1997

Having said that, accepting this reality also made people in the Middle East look at Israel as a creation of Europeans who had always been intolerant and had kept the hatred against the Jewish nation fueled for centuries. The Muslims had to pay the price for European crimes and history. Whilst the Western countries had created their oasis in the dessert, Israel was now their ‘darling’ and everything that nation did was right and good. I traveled to Iran in the early 1990s, when I was thirty-two. My best friends in Florence were Sharon who was American, and Sara who was Australian. Sharon was Jewish from her mother’s side, but she denied being Jewish because she said that her father was a Christian white American. She was blondish and blue eyed, and no one could actually tell from her appearance that she was a New York Jewess and possibly a Zionist.

I liked her, even though my heart told me that she was probably not on my side. I was grateful for her leftist political conversations because she was informed. Ordinary people in Europe were really not that interested in world politics, unless they were students or intellectual of some kind. Those were the 1980s and 1990s, when 9/11 hadn’t been ‘created’ to brainwash the world.

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‘Da Sein’ (which translates to ‘Being There’ from Heidegger Acrylic on canvas, 1991

During the spring of 1992, I had had a court case against the shop where I use to work for some years, during the summer months. My lawyer was a young, handsome Florentine.

The picture below was a homage to those white people in the corridors of power, who have controlled the world events after World War Two with the utmost nonchalance. ‘Entente Cordial’ is the name.

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That summer, I had been painting my apartment blue.

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‘Entente cordial, (or Goodbye to Palestine)’ Watercolour, 1988

Sharon would say things which I had heard my uncle say, the same leftist arguments. It was so reassuring! I was happy to be friends with her because she was intellectually alive and sensitive, where other people really couldn’t be bothered. For example, she was interested in the Bosnian War, and she was moved by the events happening in central Eastern Europe as much as I was.

It was now 1994 and my uncle hadn’t liked me staying on in Florence after getting my degree in 1992. I suppose he thought that I should have left Italy, and that my staying on in Europe after my BA was really unnecessary. After they arrived at the train station, I had taken them back to my apartment.

When they came to the house, I was showing Auntie Ylva my paintings; she had bought some paintings from me in the past. I had done this huge one of the sea-barrier reef. It was two or three metres big and it was a lovely peaceful picture. I called it ‘Underwater Scene’. Of course I showed it to her with

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an interest in selling it, as I was penniless and I don’t deny that slimy money intention underneath the exposure of my work.

‘Panorama Subacquea’ or ‘Underwater Scene’ Oil on canvas, 1989

She did admire the picture, and I was happy to show it to someone who appreciated it. Little did I know that my uncle was seething! I suppose it was as if he had been a child who had lost his mother’s attention for one minute, and he didn’t like me having done something which wasn’t under his control. I can imagine the reason and the psychology that lay behind his anger. He started to say some very unpleasant things then, and I just stood there and took those words silently, thinking, oh my God! Why do I deserve this being shouted at and called names? Later on, when he’d cooled down, he confessed that he had always wanted to be an artist himself but couldn’t afford to approach art.

He had to earn his living and had had to concentrate on the practicalities and other paths.

However, he didn’t say he was sorry. I had learnt in another similar experience to take what was dished out from the elders with some philosophy, so we made an appointment

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for the next day, as if nothing had happened. Just as if no offensive words had been spoken. I suppose I only tolerated that scene because I was helpless and poor. Plus, I didn’t want to fight with him in front of his wife. Later on, my brother said, “beggars can’t be choosers” and that was me being a beggar. He was right in saying that I had received too much from my uncle. It is true that my uncle had been a real friend and had always helped me during the years at university. He had been a rock.

They stayed for a few days in a hotel in Via Nazionale because my uncle refused to stay in the blue apartment. I took them to Viareggio for the day. We went to a place right by the seaside and had lunch. Ylva and I were quiet, very subdued and a heavy air of dark unresolved feelings was around us and in my heart. I was glad to see them go back to the UK.

My uncle did give me some money as an atonement for his misbehavior and kind words before we parted, and I was grateful for that. He had always helped me out.

Some years later, I was left some money by my Aunt Ylva in her spoken will. She had suffered a stomach ailment and had come through the critical period, only to get a hospital infection. On her deathbed, she remembered me and asked her husband to give me £8,000. My Uncle was good enough to send me £3,000 of this sum, and I managed to go to Paris after years of hardship. The astonishing thing was that he had asked me to buy a small apartment for myself with this money! Then, when I told him that I had been to Paris, he didn’t like that at all and was angry again.

He said that he would send me the rest of the inheritance left by my aunt, his wife, if I obeyed his one wish – i.e. he wanted me to promise that I would give up my ambition of becoming a painter.

I couldn’t give up painting and art like he’d asked me to, since I was in the studio in Via Fiesolana since 1998 and had worked so much towards that goal. I told him that I wouldn’t promise anything of the sort. It was ridiculous of him to ask me such a thing and he was going against all his leftist ideas.

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He decided to keep the money, since he said that he had spent about £5,000 on me when I stayed with him in England.

It was very out of character. He wasn’t the man he used to be some years ago and by saying such things, I was very confused about what I should do. His coming between me and my life’s ambition seemed a bit too much, but I felt that it wasn’t really him who was doing this. It was probably grief, as other out of character things did happen after Auntie Ylva passed away.

My uncle, who had never talked about any dark event in his childhood, started to say that the servants at home in India – he was a child of Bangalore – had mistreated him. It was totally unbelievable, especially since he hadn’t given the minimum sign of such events all through the years in which we knew him. It was very embarrassing for us to hear him speak of such things now. However, now I understand that it was the psychological breakdown that was upon us and through this suffering, other venues – ‘the dark forces’ – had come to create mischief in our family relationships. Relationships which had been very peaceful until then.

His last year was spent in isolation, with his girlfriend who got married to him; who became his partner and looked after him. He was separated mentally from his loved ones, and none of us could do anything to make it better for him. He was lucky in that he could rely on his beloved second wife – ironically, she was German.

As usual, I was penniless all the while and couldn’t even go to the UK to make up with him. Even when my Irish friend Michaela offered to go to his house and talk to him for my sake, as an ambassador of peace, I didn’t accept it. I really didn’t know how to interpret his behaviour; perhaps I should have accepted her offer, but then I didn’t think that he would die in such a short time.

I am grateful to him, because he didn’t hinder me to go to the art school that year in 1981.

Life is funny because we think that we have so much time ahead of us – but then we really don’t. Every decision we make could be the most important one. 1981 was the year of

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the Iranian revolution, and from being well off, we were about to become very poor and discriminated against. Like many others of my countrymen, I had had a proposal from the Foreign Office visa section; if I didn’t leave the country for three years, I would be given a British passport.

Even though this was a huge opportunity, I couldn’t accept it because I felt that I was too confused in England and that I needed my family. So I left London to go to Karachi that summer and then regretted that decision very much. However, it was the best decision, the healthiest one and I feel good to have taken that step, even though it was hard for me later.

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Studying and working in Florence, Italy, 1984 – 2005

I was twenty-four when I moved from Via Maggio to the students apartment in Via Bolognese. I had been living and working in the centre of Florence for nearly a year now. I had a job in the leather store in Borgo Santissima Apostali, right next to the fascinating old bridge the Ponte Vecchio. I had left the apartment in Via Maggio, where I had lived with Dona. This was in 1984, when Italy won the World Cup, and everyone went celebrating and didn’t allow any peace and quiet until late.

Via Bolognese

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I had left the Via Maggio apartment in 1984 because of the noise which only stopped from 3am to 5am in the morning. Later on, it became a traffic-controlled area, but I was happy to leave it for Via Bolognese. I loved the apartment in Via Bolognese because it was close to the countryside. Linda, who was English but married to an Italian, moved into the apartment in Via Maggio. She was younger than I was and later on got together with Daniele, the owner of the jewellery store I was working in. She seemed to follow me in my life.

Via Bolognese was an upper middle class sort of area; very quiet and conservative. In the apartment there were mostly people in their twenties, and they tended to be the student types. Peter had rented it, having found the place through his university where he was a PHD student. This, plus the fact that he was German, were good enough credentials for the landlord.

View from the bridge Pencil on Paper, 1982

It wasn’t the apartment itself but the views, the sights and sounds offered from the windows. You could see olive groves

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and fields from the windows. While other houses were far away, you heard the birds and the breeze in the trees rather than the noise of human activity. It was totally different from Via Maggio. We didn’t bother much about the neighbours because we hardly ever saw them, except for the people who lived downstairs, for they were often in their garden.

It was a very big change from Via Maggio, which was a decadent type of deluxe apartment with parquet flooring and special lights. However, it did have some positive points. It was well furnished and central. It was very good for going to work in the centre. I used to walk to work in order to get a feel for the city as I went past cafes and the shops in the mornings. The buzz of the city, especially in the mornings, was very exciting.

People shouting friendly buongiornos to each other as their working day began. You felt the freshness of the new day. Then there was the Ponte, my favourite place to cross and go over to reach the commercial side of the town. I went along Via Gucciardini, looking at the shop windows before going on to the bridge, and then on to the Por Santa Maria.

Via Maggio area Watercolour, 1999

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The centre around Borgo SS. Apostoli was a little claustrophobic; a closed in sort of life. One didn’t get away from the work routine and reality at all. Whereas, in Via Bolognese, you felt that you could finally hear yourself think. I was very grateful for the peace. The tranquillity of the place was true luxury.

In Via Maggio I had entertained people who I got to know through my flatmate Dona.

Her friend Sally was working in the same Por Santa Maria Road, in a shop selling textiles and materials. I had become friends with her even though we didn’t have anything in common.

Borgo SS Apostoli Watercolour, 2003

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She was of a wealthy Californian family and had come to Florence for a holiday. Then she had decided to stay. She met a man who was working in the central market. A family man – Emilio. He was a tall man with orange coloured hair and lots of freckles.

We used to go out together at times and invite them over. They were a little older than I was. She was thirty two years old and wanted very much to get married to her boyfriend. However, when she did get married, she was bored out of her mind, living in the suburbs of Montecatini, without working or having much money to spend.

“The Thing In The Jar” (An idea from a science fiction book) Watercolour, 1983

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