Mostafa Keyhani | With Head & Heart - Southwest Art Magazine

Mostafa Keyhani takes an energetic approach to creating his impressionistic paintings

By Norman Kolpas

Mostafa Keyhani, Fresh From the Farm, oil, 16 x 20.

This story was featured in the November 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

LATE IN THE SPRING of 2019, Mostafa Keyhani made a trip from his home in Toronto to Southern California with his daughter, artist and hat designer Maryam Keyhani. Early one morning, while she was reuniting with friends in Los Angeles, he decided to travel south to see the Spanish mission in San Juan Capistrano, famed for the swallows that return to nest there each March following a 6,000-mile migration from Argentina.

“I find it’s a very, very painterly place,” says Keyhani in his softly accented English. “Everywhere in this mission is beautiful to paint.” After strolling the peaceful grounds of the historic outpost, which was founded in 1776, he settled on a vantage point looking along the colonnade of its south wing, with a glimpse into the central courtyard. Keyhani opened his pochade box—the portable easel and palette carried by most plein-air painters—and began to capture the scene.

First, he applied “a very washy, warm tone” to the 20-by-16-inch canvas and then wiped it off, creating an undercoat that would subtly contribute to the sunny glow of the finished work. Next, using a fine, narrow brush, he swiftly, surely sketched his composition in transparent oxide brown, capturing the old-world charm of the structure and its gardens.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Legend, oil, 12 x 9.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Mission San Juan Capistrano, oil, 20 x 16.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Pansies, oil, 16 x 16.

Then the action began. Holding a brush in his right hand and a palette knife in his left, Keyhani brought the mission to life. His brushwork faithfully reproduced what any passerby might have beheld, while the palette knife added sculptural flourishes of oil impasto—sometimes subtly graceful, sometimes boldly energetic—that animated the scene. Within three to four hours, the painting had fully taken form, particularly the effects of light and shadow at what the artist judged to be the optimum moment. “The light changes very, very fast, so you need to have it in your memory,” he says. After a brief break for lunch, he returned for another two to three hours, adding his finishing touches. “Sometimes I [also] add them back in my studio, but for this picture there was nothing more to do,” he adds.

Keyhani’s two-handed painting technique might well excite neuroscientists who study the human brain’s two hemispheres, particularly because the artist uses each hand exclusively for a specific task. “I can paint masterfully with a brush in my right hand and make texture with the palette knife in my left,” he says. “But I can’t do either if I switch hands.” That makes perfect sense, considering that the right hand is controlled by the left side of the brain, which governs logic, order, and form; the left hand is guided by the right brain, the center of intuition and creativity inspiring the bold flights of fancy that typify Keyhani’s style.

FROM AN early age, Keyhani heeded the irresistible call to be an artist. “I was 5 or 6 when I asked my parents to buy me drawing materials,” he recalls of his childhood in Kangavar, an ancient town about 250 miles west-southwest of Tehran, Iran. The second of four children, with a father who taught elementary school, he grew up with a deep respect for education. Around the age of 12, he earned his first distinction as an artist, winning a painting competition for his still life of a water flask.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Charrt Cake With Candle, oil, 16 x 12.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Paris Café, oil, 20 x 16.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Western Collection, oil, 18 x 14.

Still, as the first of two sons in his family, Keyhani felt some responsibility to pursue a respectable profession. After high school, he entered Tabriz University, home to one of Iran’s top medical schools, with the goal of becoming a doctor. “But I preferred studying anatomy, and was more interested in drawing the human body,” he says. So, following that inclination, he eventually switched his major to art history. After Tabriz, he completed a further one-year certificate course in drawing at Tehran University.

Even more significant than that, he notes, were four years of private study that followed with Ruyin Pakbaz, Iran’s foremost art historian and educator, as well as a respected painter and painting teacher in his own right. “Whatever I learned about color, I learned from him,” says Keyhani, his voice hushed with respect. “He is one of my heroes.”

Although Keyhani was poised to launch his own career as an artist, he felt the political climate in his country would make that difficult. The year was 1985, six years after revolution had swept through Iran, pushing out the Shah, and in the midst of that nation’s eight-year war with Iraq. He and his wife Mahin and their young daughter moved for a year to Istanbul, where a prominent collector took interest in his paintings and found an enthusiastic market for them in Germany. Eventually, Mahin and Maryam returned to Tehran, while Mostafa moved to Dusseldorf, Germany, for five years. “I studied art, painted every single day, sold my paintings, and visited my wife and daughter every three or four months,” he says. Finally, after two years back in his country and “finding it very hard to work and sell my paintings there,” the whole family immigrated to Canada in 1996.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Clown, oil, 20 x 16.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Doggy, oil, 20 x 16.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Eiffel Tower at Night, oil, 16 x 16.

Almost immediately, he found an agent and galleries to represent him, both in Toronto and in the United States. One prominent gallery in Carmel gave him his first solo show of 45 paintings in September 2000, and every one of them sold before opening night. Seemingly overnight, following more than two decades of study and hard work in the Middle East and Europe, Keyhani had found resounding success in North America.

TODAY, HE still paints daily in the large studio that occupies one of the bedrooms in the spacious Toronto condo where he and Mahin now live. Though his travel habits have been curtailed this year by the pandemic, Keyhani typically spends at least two months each summer in Europe, painting en plein air in favorite locations including Paris, Prague, Venice, and the Côte d’Azur. “I’m very interested in cityscapes,” he says of the bustling street scenes and high-spirited café life he portrays.

Closer to home, Keyhani has been turning his attention to painting still-life works, in which his signature combination of faithful rendering and bravura paint application bring appealing depth and engaging energy to his subjects. He’ll often put almost as much time into arranging his composition as he spends painting it. “I play with the materials, and then I play and I play some more, maybe changing it three, four, or five times until I am happy,” he says. Then he follows the same basic process he uses for his plein-air work—undercoat, brush sketch, and two-handed brush-and-palette-knife application. He’ll work for three to five hours that first day, mixing his oils with the fast-drying medium Liquin so that the painting will be ready for his finishing touches—fine details, highlights, and more texture—the next day.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Orchestra, oil, 16 x 16.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Goat With Bell, oil, 20 x 16.

: Mostafa Keyhani, Mahatma Gandhi, oil, 16 x 16.

Portraits are yet another area of passionate interest for the artist, tracing back to his early days doing anatomical drawings at Tabriz University. A fine example of the vibrant life he brings to such paintings is LEGEND. For this particular work he set himself the challenge of using the “Zorn palette,” attributed to Swedish artist Anders Zorn: just four colors—yellow ochre, ivory black, cadmium red light, and titanium white—to achieve a lifelike spectrum of hues. “I was very excited to learn how I can use this palette,” says Keyhani. “The warm and cool gray colors are fantastic.”

Such continuous explorations are essential to his life as an artist, says Keyhani, who still thinks of himself as a student all these years after his formal studies concluded. “There is no question about it,” he says. “I study a lot. I think a lot. I work a lot. I teach myself every single day. I’ve been working 45 years, every single day from 8 o’clock in the morning to 6 in the afternoon. Sometimes I wake up at 5 o’clock because I feel I need more time to create my paintings. I think I’m one of the fastest artists, but I work fast only because I know what I’m doing. I think a good artist must continue to learn and draw until he goes to his grave. You can never call yourself a master.”

The goal of all his hard work, though, is ultimately not about himself but about being able to “make people happy when they look at my paintings,” Keyhani hastens to add. “We live in a crazy world, and not everything is perfect. With my work, I try to make a better world.”

representation
Buckingham Gallery of Fine Art, Uxbridge, ON; Gainsborough Galleries, Calgary, AB; Galerie d’Art Le Bourget, Montreal, QC; Eisele Fine Art, Cincinnati, OH; Highlands Art Gallery, Lambertville, NJ; Jones & Terwilliger Galleries, Carmel and Palm Desert, CA; Lu Martin Galleries, Laguna Beach, CA; Gallery Gevik, Toronto, ON; Westmount Gallery, Toronto, ON.