Artist’s View: the Travel Inspirations of Painter Kimia Ferdowsi Kline

“Oftentimes in Iran, there’s a courtyard garden in the center of the house and all the rooms branch off from it. In my father’s house they had a big backyard and a pool. This is what the pool looked like in my dad’s backyard with all these pomegranates. He explained to me that to drain the pool, they would all get inside it and drain it out with bowls, but he only told me that after I made this painting. It was also inspired by the idea of the hammam, so all the figures are bathers.”

“This girl isn’t exactly me, but I liked the pose. It’s a way of creating a memory fictitiously.”

“This one is titled Pink Garden and it was one of the first in this Iran memory series. It was based on the stories and a few images I had seen of my dad’s backyard growing up. And then the color pink—I wanted it to feel a little removed from reality, a little magical and really joyful, and pink is the quintessential color for that.”

“My dad grew up in Tehran, in the capital. My grandfather was very affluent. He had several houses in the country, including one on the Caspian Sea. The house in Tehran is an orphanage now, but they don’t know what happened to the other ones. Everything was seized. The revolution was in ’79, my grandfather was executed in ’82, and that’s when his whole family left. They all had to be smuggled out of the country. They had to escape in the middle of the night with a bag.”

“I think a lot of people look at my paintings and just see very beautiful, sunny, dreamlike landscapes, and I think the reason I utilize beauty in that way is it’s my own protest. Such awful things happened to my family at the hands of this regime, but I refuse to let it get me down. In response, I’m going to make paintings about hope and beauty and all of the wonderful memories that they had during their life there. So I like that it’s rooted in tragedy, but what comes from it is beauty.”

“Matisse is a big influence. I love Francesco Clemente. I love Vuillard, Bonnard, Manet, Monet—all the French Impressionists, and also the Bay Area Painters, so Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, David Hockney, and Wayne Thiebaud. I got my masters in San Francisco and one of the big reasons I wanted to go to school out there was because Richard Diebenkorn taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and I was really interested in that way of painting.”

“I’m really inspired by literature. One of my thesis shows was about the Lost Generation writers, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I think it ties into the idea of painting stories, the whole idea of the narrative matching the visual.”

“I look at a lot of Eastern artists as well, like Persian miniatures. The way I deal with space is a mishmash of East and West. There’s some space and some perspective, but at the same time everything is really flattened out.”

“This painting is called Shiraz Morning. Shiraz is famous for the blue tiles. And there’s such an art history tradition of windows that I’ve been playing with a lot. I like that you can’t tell where it is. It’s the title that places you. That kind of speaks to the idea of memory, to it being this fictitious place. And my grandfather on my mother’s side is from Shiraz, so I thought maybe that’s what it was like when he woke up in the morning.”

“This is the River Jordan. Another thing I’ve been experimenting with is the idea of the Silk Road that went from China to Persia and all the way to the West, and the idea of it being this exotic thing, but also something that my ancestors were probably a part of. I was looking at the Caspian Sea, which is on the Silk Road, and the River Jordan.”

“This one is titled Threat and Sanctuary. It was an expansion on the theme of the garden. All the black branches felt like an enclosure, like a safe space.”

“This one is based on a courtyard in Tangier at El Minzah Hotel. I loved Morocco—all of these stories I heard about the architecture and design—it was the first time I tangibly saw it. It’s the closest thing to seeing Iranian art in Iran. I especially noticed the use of pattern, the use of flattened space, and the use of color. I think my use of color comes from the Middle East.”