About Katayoon
“I go I know not where to bring back I know not what.” ~ Russian fairytale
I believe in transcendence, in sparks of joy and the luminosity of spirit. As a young child, I drew and painted and tended to my Noah’s Ark animals. In some ways, little has changed!
Painting is to me a reflection of beingness, of reaching up to hold the hand of love and joy, sorrow or the winds of an imaginative silence, in this real-unreal world.
My earliest inspirations were Dürer’s A Young Hare and Sewell’s Black Beauty, Dodie Smith and Johnny Appleseed, everything magical and sublime like my mother and nanny when we lived in Darband in Tehran and our simple apartment before that, Chopin, Clementi, the Caspian, later the French and Russian novelists, Rimbaud and Duras, Camille Claudel, beauty in all its shapes and forms, including of course all those beautiful fairytale cartoons. Oh, and Jeanne d’Arc, Inspector Clouseau, Mr. Balanchine’s glorious dancers, Chaplin’s Limelight, Lombard and Monroe, Saura’s Cria Cuervos, the angels and Ordinary People, and Goya, always Goya. And Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, forever.
My last near-death experience, in 2002, strengthened my connection to the spirit realm, prompting me to study clairvoyance and the healing arts. I feel now that I was given the choice to stay to help bring about transformation of pain and usher in new ways of being.
I wonder if you too feel the veils between the worlds thinner than ever now? And if you are experiencing growing awarenesses, and a call toward healing old patterns so we can move beyond them into more sparkly lived realities? If so, you may resonate with my artwork or may wish to connect for a reading or remote healing.
Some of my paintings are held in private collections in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, or have been exhibited in group shows at the former Barbara Anderson Gallery in Berkeley, The Greenlining Institute, and at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art as part of their Fashionistas Fight Back! show. My work has also been featured at Swallowtail in San Francisco, at a solo show at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California, and a long exhibit in 2021-2022 at Frank + Lola here in Oakland, California. Four pieces will be featured digitally at the San Diego Art Fair on November 2-3, 2023. I am holding East Bay Open Studios at my home studio on December 2-3, 2023 from 11-5 PM. I also recently had the pleasure of being interviewed about my NDE by Jeff Mara for his podcast https://shorturl.at/lFP16 .
If interested in a particular piece or a spirit-based commission, please email me at kat (@) katayoonart (dot) com. (The contact form on this site gets glitchy.) If you wish to connect on Instagram, please find me at https://tinyurl.com/5c29vah3 or on Facebook at https://tinyurl.com/35jjdxd3. I use handmade, highly pigmented oil paints on linen, paper, and wood. My pieces are often mounted on custom-made stretcher bars. A generous portion of all sales is happily donated to various human rights and animal organizations, including Panthera, Defenders of Wildlife, and various mustang and wild burro charities, including Fondouk.
I am a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. To view my poetry and writing, please visit www.katayoon.net. Manuscripts for a second book of poetry, a potential novella and children’s books are all over my kitchen table.
Thank you for visiting!
Yours in Joy,
Katayoon Aliosha
California 2023