Sahba Ayati

Education Diploma in Graphic Design, Tehran School of Fine Arts B.A. in Painting, Iran’s University of Art M.A. student in Illustration, University of Tehran I have been interested in art and painting since an early age and filled several sketchbooks with my drawings. Most of my subjects were inspired by my surroundings, birds, houses, trees, and people in the street. I also enjoyed creating collages using pieces of colored paper, fabric, and other materials and combining them with watercolor or wax crayons. During elementary school, I spent much of my free time making handicrafts and handmade postcards. I chose Graphic Design as my field of study in art high school. During those two years, I gained a variety of new experiences, including learning different printmaking techniques, working with Photoshop, calligraphy, logo and poster design, illustration techniques, and analog photography and darkroom printing, all of which I found genuinely fascinating. I was later accepted into the Painting program at university, where my experiences were, to some extent, similar to those of art high school. During this period, my primary focus and interest were figurative drawing and painting, particularly portraiture. Over time, and especially in recent years, I became increasingly interested in landscape and nature painting, particularly in watercolor. Through experimentation with the wet-on-wet technique, I gradually developed my own visual language. Watercolor became my primary medium, and over the course of two years I created the series “Blurring the Edges of Reality”. Created in watercolor on paper, this series is an exploration of the fragile boundary between reality and memory, drawing on scenes from nature that have held personal significance for me. In these works, images seem to gradually fade even as they come into being. Through the fluid language of watercolor, I seek to convey the ephemeral quality of a moment. These works emerge from inner experiences and emotions that are sensed more than observed, embodying both the process of vanishing and a gradual sense of decay, as well as the lingering resonance of what remains after fading away. My recent works focus on depicting fragments of gardens. They explore themes of memory, transience, and the fading boundary between imagination and reality. My primary concern is not the realistic representation of garden scenes, but rather the portrayal of memories of gardens, faint memories that linger in the mind. These works are created primarily with watercolor and colored inks on tracing paper to reinforce the sense of fragility and impermanence that lies at the core of my artistic practice. Through translucent layers and soft colors, I seek to evoke the dreamlike and ephemeral quality of memories of gardens as they exist in the mind and imagination.