SHOHREH MEHRAN
Artist's statement
I am submitting four recent paintings for your consideration. Like all my other paintings, they are done in oil and depict scenes of urban life in Tehran. My working method is as follows: I shoot several photographs of a scene that has intrigued me (streets, street signs, buildings, or in the case of the works I'm submitting here, college students.) Some of these photographs are "documentary" and others are "staged" by me. I then manipulate these images in photoshop (ie. change the colors, the backgrounds, the composition of the image, etc.) and paint the resulting image on canvas. I often go back to the original image halfway through the painting process and rework it based on the insights I've had while painting.
