I grew up in Qazvin, Iran, which was a very religious and conservative city. I don’t know where I got it from, but I had this urge to be an artist. I left Iran in 1975 to study art at the University of California, Berkeley, where I received my Bachelor’s, Master of Arts, and Master of Fine Arts degrees. It was there that I realised my idea of being an artist was purely romantic; I was not good at art at all.
After the revolution [in 1987], the United States and
