The Catalan Painting

Born in the heart of the home of cricket, Edgbaston "where the trees begin", Parirokh is an accidental Brummie, resident in Switzerland - the first homeland of her own choice. Her journey to Geneva has taken her from England to Tehran to London, Oxford, Paris, Hong Kong and New York. As a child she used to write and illustrate her own poems and later on copy paintings by Matisse and van Gogh. While at Oxford “I had the privilege of walking in and out of drawing classes at the Ruskin - all sitting figures or tables and chairs piled high to be rendered precisely. A suitable point of departure into abstract painting!” Her work expresses the impenetrable mystery of all that we are and all that surrounds, motivates, regulates and controls us: “My constant awareness that I am but as an ant in the celestial garden. I am no more aware of what is above me as the minute creature crushed under my foot is of me. I navigate the dark impossibility of infinity and nothingness. The mind incapable of discerning a non-existent shore in search of the gate to wisdom. The body, a virtual universe in its own right, with the intelligence of its innumerable living cells, with their administrations, functions and secrets”. Then there are the Persian gardens, mosaic and marquetry, geometrical motifs - a myriad of coloured patterns embedded in her genetic heritage. “Am I an artist? I always think those of us who make ‘art’ are not dissimilar to serial killers: We can't help it”. As an abstract artist she cannot explain how her work develops from the initial small form painted on to the canvas into a mass of colour and forms which are cast away to float in the infinite universe. “Nothing is deliberate...The invisible hand that guides me? I recognise what I see at the end, because I know the inspiration of the moment”. She acknowledges the inevitability of inspiration and influence of generations of great poets and philosophers who sought the simplicity of the essence of their existence and would sacrifice all for a moment's enlightenment: "Why must I yet the body's captive be, When spiritual gardens call to me? Give me to drink, till I am full of wine, Then mark what wisdom and what power are mine: Into my keeping let your goblet pass, And I will view the world within that glass: Intoxicate, of saintliness I'll sing, And in my beggar's rags I'll play the king. When Hafiz lifts his voice in drunken cheer, Venus applauds his anthem from her sphere".