AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

http://www.farzadkohan.com/index.html

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.