Sarvenaz Farsian was born in 1984. She came from jewelry making family and learned early onto see worlds in miniature, macrocosms caught and reproduced in microcosms. Jewelry is a time consuming, painstaking art and from this she learned to sharpen her focus.
Sarvenaz is obsessive about making work and often sits making her marks for ten hours at a time. She works with a black pen and has honed her detailed methodology over twenty years. Like the Czech artist Anna Zemánková, she immerses herself in the work which becomes a way of self-therapy and self-healing in drastic times. In her drawings she attempts to encompass nebulous spaces without the conceptual confines of narration. For her this is a demonstration of personal freedom in an environment where artmaking of any kind becomes a statement of cultural resistance.
In her own words she writes: My paintings begin from an unknown starting point, without any sketches or predictions. At the end of the work when I look at my painting from a distance, it is just like the end of one’s life in which the light and the darkness of each part are symbols of pain and joy.
The beginning and the ending When I start drawing on a plain white surface of a canvas or paper is the moment of birth, and the moment I finish drawing is the loss of life. On this journey of life there are joyful moments and of course severities that are slowly formed in my paintings.
On the sad and happy times, I follow my instincts and just continue weaving the lines together. Each drawing take hours, and during this time I am not always the same. I review different periods of my life. Since I do not like to talk about my past and my childhood, doing so gives me a kind of peace of mind and I feel safe while painting. To me it’s Just like meditating.
I’ve always been attracted to the details. Tiny little things attract me. That’s why I choose the thinnest pen tip to draw. As the surface gets bigger and wider, my painting will be accompanied by more details. And with that, my patience will increase too. In fact, I’m happier to work on a larger scale. They are like a long life where more events happen. The forms that one might see in my work are all coincidental. Those forms sometimes even surprise me.