An artist who has lived and worked on several
continents, Farzad
Kohan currently resides in Los Angeles.
He works in several media, including
conceptual mixed media pieces, but he's
becoming quite well known for his series of
Puppeteers. These captivating sculptures are
braided from a mixture of clay and wood chips
laid over a wire frame, and represent our
human core, free of gender, race, culture or
anything else that we use to judge one
another. Read on to see what Farzad
has to say:
I started playing keyboard when I was six
years old. I 'll never forget that moment when I
stopped playing others' compositions and
started making my own music. It felt
different. I felt powerful because I made
something out of nothing. Music taught me
how to be in tune with myself, how to trust
myself and my feelings when I am about to
create something. All I had to do was to
close my eyes and listen to my impulses. I
remember carving my first piece of stone when
I was a teenager. The stone was very small,
but I used a nail to make some scratches and
kept working at it. I had no idea what I was
going to make but I knew that I could not
leave it, I had to finish it. Something
inside me was calling me and I responded.
Today, after so many years, I still make
things from objects that I find in my
environment, whether it is a piece of
sculpture in which I use recycled wood from a
construction site, making a chalk drawing on
asphalt, or just going bare hands to nature
to make hearts out of flowers, roads out of
leaves, or circles on sand. My recent
drawings are made out of coffee, tea, milk,
oil, and black paint. I still use the
concept of manifesting my inner world out of
the ordinary things around us. I am pretty
much the same artist that learned to play my
own voice when I was six; the only thing that
has changed is that now it is 24/7. You can
not be an artist just for a part of the day.
Being an artist is a life. I am blessed to
have my life, not just because I can make
things, but because I can communicate with
other human beings everywhere in a language
that needs no translation. Art makes me a
citizen of the world.
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