I was born on August 17, 1959, in a desert city in Iran. The surrounding landscape could appear severe, but severity made every interruption of color more intense. Greenery, water, shade, and reflected light did not disappear into abundance; each announced itself clearly. Perhaps that is why I learned so early to look for what enters an empty space and alters it.

When I was seven, I entered school with the solemn excitement of a child who believed that reading and writing would open the world. Yet before school could offer its first lesson, the old bazaar had begun teaching me in another language—it taught through fascination. Beneath its covered passageways, merchants lifted their shutters and herbalists opened shops fragrant with dried leaves, roots, and wild plants. Fabrics burned bright in the half-light, each hue transformed by the colors placed beside it. Patterns spread across walls of mud brick and straw. Voices crossed under the vaulted roofs, mingling with the scents of bread, timber, leather, dust, and human labor. The road to school was short in distance, but immense in experience. Each morning, the bazaar unfolded inside that brief journey and made the clock seem like a poor measure of time.

Light was its most persuasive teacher. It entered through openings in the domed roof and stood in the darker passages like columns without weight. Dust lifted by hundreds of footsteps drifted into those beams and became visible—rising, turning, and falling in a silent order that existed only because the light had found it. I did not yet know that this was one of art’s quiet powers: not necessarily to invent another world, but to make this one newly visible.

At school, what held me in wonder had a simpler, harsher name: lateness. Day after day I arrived after the appointed time, and I was severely punished. The adults saw a child who would not obey. They could not see that my attention had already been claimed by a form of learning I had no words to defend. Punishment taught me to fear the classroom, but it could not make the bazaar ordinary. A conflict had entered my life: authority required me to pass through the world on time, while something within me needed to stop and see what was there.

After that, I searched for light wherever it altered the familiar. In my grandmother’s reception room, it passed through wooden doors set with colored glass, entering as color rather than brightness alone. In the public bathhouse near our home, it gathered in the steam until the air itself seemed to take shape. Reason did not vanish in those moments; it simply ceased to be the only way of knowing. The visible world became a doorway to the imagined one.

The senses rarely remained separate for me. At the carpenter’s shop, the fragrance of newly cut timber made me pause, and then the grain drew my eyes into its flowing lines. A scent could awaken a landscape, and a pattern could seem to carry a rhythm. This crossing of one sense into another made the bazaar feel inexhaustible. Every object offered more than one way to enter it.

The bazaar also taught me that art could live in coordinated movement. I watched carpet weavers at work: small hands moving quickly, colored skeins of wool passing among white threads, local songs giving rhythm to the labor. No single motion contained the pattern, yet the pattern slowly came into being through all of them. Later, I recognized a similar order in fields of wheat when the wind moved across the golden stalks beneath the blue sky and the fierce desert sun. The field was never still, but its movement did not destroy its harmony—it created it.

Color and form first attracted me, but people’s eyes deepened my way of seeing. I studied them before I listened to words. In the blue-gray eyes of a mother, I imagined tenderness and sacrifice beside humiliation, judgment, endurance, and grief. The eyes of a young shepherd carried intelligence and playfulness, yet also the wishes that poverty had reduced to their most basic form: shoes, warm clothing, enough food for winter. In the face of the neighborhood street sweeper, weather and work had left their marks, but kindness remained visible. Even the angry merchant, shouting orders through the bazaar, taught me something: a gaze could contain calculation and power, awakening fear in the person who received it.

I could not know the full histories of those people. What held me was the sense that a visible face concealed more life than it declared. Looking was not only an appetite for color; it was an attempt to reach the person within the appearance. Long before I understood what kind of artist I might become, I was learning that sight has depth. A painter does not stop at what the eye meets first.