Meet an Iranian painter: Iran Darroudi

Iran Darroudi was born in the culturally wealthy Iranian city of Mashhad, in the evening of September 2nd, 1936. Her father came from a renowned family of traders from Khorasan and her mother from a family of Caucasian merchants who had migrated to Iran and settled in Mashhad in the wake of the October Revolution.(Read more on her official web site; also available in Persian and French).

Darroudi studied at Ecole Superier des Beaux-Arts in Paris, history of art at the École du Louvre in Paris, stained glass at the Royal Academy of Brussels, and television direction and production at the R.C.A. Institute in New York.

Darroudi, an international artist, in acquaintance of Artists such as Dali and Jean Cocteau, wrote her autobiography, entitled In The Distance Between Two Points…! (1997, Persian), in which she humbly and respectfully spoke of her love for the most eminent figures in her life: master Poor-Davood, Parviz Natel Khanlari, Ahmad Shamlu, Mehdi Akhavan Saless, Forugh Farrokhzad, Bijan Mofid, and others.

She writes:

My glance, searching the identity and culture of my own land stops at specific images and perspectives: my history, Persepolis, my birth place, Mashhad, the city with numerous minarets and… a summer resort village near Mashhad, which during the Second World War constituted the hiding place for our family members, and my paintings always continued portraying those impressions.

An absolute silence dominates the space and the vitreous walls of the village, such walls without shadow; a silence as eternity and full of secrecy and ambiguity, with no oscillation.

The sky of my land is sunny, streams of light flowing thereunto. The falling of light has the reverberation of thunder. A rustic road towards the village, and other roads quite similar to furrows on the surface body of the burning land lead to the eternity, and veins and streaks of the soil, with invisible relations, lead me to very far and inaccessible routes.

Such invisible relations are in fact the same unions which later I have interpreted in my painting as my eternal relationship to my land. I have been born from such soil and will be buried in that, with such tranquility that the prevailing calmness will envy me.

I have roots in this land, not for the cultural and traditional beliefs, but for such dear individuals who have joined the eternity in it. For my predecessors have lived in a land as vast as the frontiers of Iran; and they rest throughout it in places as elevated as befits their tall statures.