The Translation of Painting

An Interview with Azadeh Elmizadeh

Border Crossings: How old were you when you came to Canada?

Azadeh Elmizadeh: I was 23. In Tehran I did a degree in graphic design. I was interested in art, but we didn’t have any artists in our family history. At the time I made the decision, I wasn’t entirely sure myself if I could make it. But I loved painting and the materiality of paint. I ended up doing graphic design, and it turned out I didn’t have much talent at being a designer. Eventually, I got better, but I was at the bottom of my class for the first two courses. I realized that design requires a very different kind of thinking from what I use in my studio practice. There, everything is open. There are loose ends and ambiguity and you don’t quite know why this thing you’re looking at has so much resonance. The whole process of making becomes one of exploration and excavation without arriving at any resolution, which is quite different from design. So I used the move from Tehran to pivot entirely into art. I enrolled in drawing and painting at OCAD and educated myself in Western contemporary art.

You use narrative in fascinating ways. Was story part of growing up in Iran?

I have this memory of my mother reading stories to my brother and me. It wasn’t sophisticated reading but tangible and accessible. Story was always there, but for a long time I resisted making work with any cultural connotations.

Why was that?

I wanted to make something that was universal. I think it had something to do with premodern conceptions of difference and the notion that culture exists as an unchanging, homogeneous entity. I hold multiple senses of belonging all at the same time, and the mark of every place I’ve been is still very much inside me. As a whole being, you bring all those influences into the studio with you. I don’t know why I thought that I would find a way to escape that. But it failed. I wasn’t happy with whatever I was making, and I realized I had to deal with what I was trying to avoid. You want to work with something that has some weight of meaning and you hope to translate that into a form of care, a care that could be felt by the viewer as well. I found that connection in language.

Which language? Farsi or English?

I have to say it’s Farsi. I’m not sure first-generation immigrants ever pass the stage where they don’t translate while they’re talking. For me, the barrier remains. I think in Farsi and end up writing in English. The connection is there on a regular daily basis.

So your life is a process of constant translation?

Yes. I often think about my work in relation to the existing gap in translation. The paintings feel like translations that have gone wrong, where miscommunication becomes a generative space to arrive at new and multiple readings.

Were Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings and One Thousand and One Nights part of your education?

I was familiar with fragments of these tales throughout my upbringing. As my interest grew, I decided to delve deeper in terms of research and explore the connection between these mythological characters and motifs that have travelled from pre-Islamic texts to more modern takes on Shahnameh by the 10th-century poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi. Tracing the role of these characters through generations, and the way they have mutated as a response to changes in society, is fascinating. They’ve never disappeared. In my last solo show at Franz Kaka called “Sister Seeds” (2022), what became meaningful to me was the way the two sisters stood for the continuity of the feminine soul throughout time.

I’m interested in the influence that Sufic thinking has had on you. My reading of Sufism is that in temporal and spatial terms it represents a condition of constant becoming. The obvious place to go, then, is to wonder how that philosophy of thinking about time and space aestheticizes itself in the work.

I think it’s the making in the studio that puts you in a condition of becoming. There are aspects about Sufic thinking that resonated with what I was doing three years ago when I was researching the underlying philosophical and theological ideas that are infused in Persian miniature painting’s mode of representation. Now I’m trying to distance myself from its religious context. When I look at the work I’m doing now, I think about “becoming” in relation to the physical presence of making work in the studio. There exists a dialogue between what you have in your mind, the image in your imagination, and how you’re hunting for it while painting. You initiate that dialogue, and it changes constantly; it changes you and it changes the painting. You “become” together in a very intense presence in the moment.

Does the Sufic notion of becoming determine why so many of your works are about a journey, a voyage, a transitional moment in moving not just from one place to another but from one state to another?

Thank you for the articulate way that you put it. What has drawn me to the allegorical narratives of voyage in Sufic literature and poetry is an open-ended dimension that allows interpretation to occur at a personal level. Making the paintings brings you to linger on transitional moments of moving, too. While I am in the studio, the experience of time is ecstatic and joyful. As a painter, that’s a very sweet spot to be in. It’s not always like that. But once you achieve it, once you’re there, it’s very productive.

Are you naturally predisposed towards the threshold and the liminal?

Moving from one place to another, speaking in-between languages and being in two different places at the same time are a condition of liminality. I can’t quite confidently say that it’s a diasporic condition. But knowing my own experience and that of friends and family makes me able to draw the conclusion that being in a state of mental and physical movement is a liminal state that has meaning besides living as an immigrant in diaspora. The image projected onto the imagination appears and disappears in a liminal space, too. There’s no way that you can hunt it or hold it down. It’s flickering and dynamic. Dealing with that also puts you in a space of uncertainty, where you can’t quite be sure if it’s there, or if it’s not, or where you can draw the line. My solution for that is to make peace with non-resolution.

You’ve been resistant to the idea of fixed categories, so in your hybridizing of East and West, your interest has been to find the interstices between them. You talk about Helen Frankenthaler, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Klee and you also talk about Persian miniature painting. Was your way of fitting into an aesthetic world a strategy of resistance to simple categories?

That’s a fair way to put it. To me, painting has become a space of convergence for multiple histories and temporalities rather than division, where I simply have the chance to bypass reductive categorization. It allows for the creation of an aesthetic world that is delimited with shifting and dissolving boundaries. I hope my work suspends the enforced fictive binaries of the East and the West, while at the same time it turns into a form of expression for the sense of belonging residing in the symbolic universe of language and rituals.

You have a body of work called “In Between” (2022) and the painting Spherical Waves (2022) takes the fluidity of the wave and turns it into a form. Fluidity seems to be more formative in your sensibility of making than does fixity.

It’s all about fluidity, really. It’s in the use of colours, the way the paintings are constructed, the way they go through stages of transformation over long periods of time and the way they never really arrive at resolution. Whenever I start a new body of work, I think, well, this one is going to be as cohesive as possible, but it never ends up like that. There are always loose ends and paintings that lead to other bodies of work. Allowing those things you can control to leak out eventually gives form to newer bodies of work and a new voice to the work.

In 2022 you made a lot of paintings.

Yes, 2022 was a productive year for me. I found a great work flow.

The exhibition “Sister Seeds” is interesting because it includes a pair of paintings of water and soil, there’s a painting called Embryo, another called Mother (Oracle). These are the components of world-making, and all the elements you need are there. Were you reflecting an existing story, or were you making your own story?

I’m not sure if I was successful in creating a story of my own, if that’s what you mean. But the desire to create one is the first impetus to excavate a distant history. That’s a long process and it’s something that will probably take a couple of more years before I get there.

You say you’ll always have a studio practice because you never properly finish any painting, so you have to go on to do something else. You’re still looking for the finished painting. You seem to have made peace with that as both methodology and philosophy. So you don’t resist it anymore?

No, I don’t resist it. It’s the hope that keeps you going. You think, well, with the next one, I’m going to be able to achieve it. But the more you paint, the more difficult it becomes to get to that point. Operating within that philosophy of work, I continuously want to get back and want to do it again and again and again. And perhaps I never get there.

So it’s generative?

I think it’s generative. How can I say? It’s this obstacle that I can work against. By the time I start the new work or the new body of work, it’s gone. The initiative of wanting to get there and then the making of the new voice urges you into a new direction. You explore things that you haven’t explored before, and things happen that are not predetermined. Making the work in the studio, for me, is what keeps it alive.

Is a salamander bird a mad mix of a species?

The salamander bird was based on a story from The Book of Surprises, a book produced in the Jalayirid Sultanate at the end of the 14th century. It’s a tale similar to the phoenix. But instead of one bird, there are multiple birds living within this mountain of fire and the salamander is known to be the reptile that survives fire.

You also have a painting called Blossoming in the Fire (2022). You take what we think of as a destructive element and turn it into a condition of growth and beauty.

I see fire as a paradoxical signifier. It could be destructive, but it’s also illuminating. In Blossoming in the Fire, I was thinking about certain seeds that germinate only when they go through a fire. In this work fire became a portal to the creation of new forms and beginnings.

Fire obviously brings up a particular colour. You’ve also used a nocturnal palette and underwater colours as well. Do colours mean specific things to you?

Colours signify certain moods for me. It’s a bit cheesy, but what draws me to certain colours is an emotional reaction.

How do you make a painting?

The making is non-linear. The surface is primed with gesso and I just grind into the surface. That creates a very interesting texture that would give you the palimpsest of what was happening underneath. But linen doesn’t allow that type of removal. It’s very delicate. So it’s just removing with a piece of cloth and a little bit of solvent, and sometimes covering the parts that I want to remove. I cover them with white, let them dry, and then I go into it and add from there. It’s a constant editing of the image. After the first layer, the whole process of painting becomes adding, removing, adding, removing. Then what I described as an experience you haven’t experienced before, suddenly happens. I have learned to get there through this process of adding and removing. I’m not saying this is the only way to do it, but I think artists work with their limitations, too. The way we learn to deal with material and to be comfortable working with material dictates our way of thinking and making in the studio.

You move from a 12 x 16-inch painting to one that is 72 x 50 inches. What determines how large you want to make the painting as opposed to how intimate you want to make it?

Both these quite contrasting scales are created with intimacy. I make the larger works on the ground, so I have a very close proximity to the surface and I maintain that proximity with a brush that is relatively small. I don’t know why, but I think it has to do with what happens when you’re working on a large painting at that close distance. There are moments when you see only patches of colour. It empties your mind. You’re looking at these waves of colour coming through one another. You don’t quite know whether it is blue on top of red or red on top of red, or where the yellow is coming from. And that long period of looking brings in the present moment in a really interesting way. Your mind empties for just a couple of seconds. Smaller works do provide an opportunity to arrive at the image at a faster pace, but I wouldn’t say there’s much of a difference in making them.

Let me backtrack a bit. Salamander Birds (2022) is a gorgeous painting, but for you it is deficient. What doesn’t it do?

It’s an impossible question that I can’t even put in words. I think if I could do what it needed, I would probably use that formula to get back to the paintings and get them done the way that I think they should have been done. But there is a moment in the studio where I think it’s done. It’s when the painting leaves the studio that I wish I had it back so I could add another layer or cover it entirely. But when I get to that threshold where I experience something that I hadn’t experienced with the painting before, then that marks the ending of it for me.

That’s the ecstasy, not the rupture.

When you get there, it’s amazing. But we change. By the time the painting reaches that place, you’ve started something else and then you’re changed by the new voice that you started. It’s a psychological barrier that eventually I have to get along with in order not to be always defeated or unhappy with my work.

In Gathering, there seemed to be more figuration going on, and the content was more human than animal. I don’t know if you feel in your work a drift towards either the human or the natural world.

Gathering came out of a time in my studio practice where I felt disconnected from the mystical aspects of the text and literature that I was looking at. I was going through my archive of imagery of miniature paintings, and I recognized these figures who are not part of the main narrative, marginalized characters who were only markers of a specific cultural and historical context. There were just ordinary people doing ordinary acts of weaving, planting, or just being in their immediate environment. So Gathering became about gathering these ordinary figures in the picture plane.

Were they already ghost figures in a sense?

Perhaps ghost figures in relation to any central and dominant narrative.

Do you start from a broken world and then patch it together? Or do you start from a whole world and what you’re doing is showing us the component parts of that world?

It’s from a broken world. It’s working from remaining fragments of a broken world. There is access to bits and pieces of ancient and archaic references that have travelled throughout time. The origin story that I’m working with now is only from existing fragments. I’m bringing those pieces together and trying to make something that feels cohesive and where each painting is a window to parts of a larger world.

A painting like Passing (2021) looks like a religious painting, as does Ascending (2022); then you have Diving Messenger (2020), which could be your version of an angelic visitation. Your work often suggests a connection with religious painting.

It’s a true observation. The other world, which was taught to us through religion, is something that is going to have a place in our memories; you’re born into it without your making a decision, and it’s going to have a mark on you. Even in rejecting it, you’re still creating the connection. It’s there. Finding its way into my work wasn’t totally intentional in some cases, but it is a question for me. I’m not sure about it. I think painting is a place where those questions of religion and spirituality can remain. Let it be. My upbringing was definitely loaded with these ideas, and it’s only natural for them to find their way into the work one way or another. But instead of having someone impose it, what I appreciate is when there is an open dialogue about it.

Does understanding the narrative and the complications of the story you’re telling matter to the viewer? It matters to you in the making, but how much of it needs to be translated for it to have meaning?

I think the intention of making a painting is different from its reception, or how the work is going to be perceived, and is going to be different from the result. Narrative is both a departure point and an anchor for me. I also consider titles as entry points where there is a return to language. At times, I include some hint in the title, and if the viewer is interested to know more about the narrative content of the work, I’ve given them a clue. But as I said earlier, what I hope is that the painting can stand on its own and not be confined by the narrative arc.