Background

Mary Paknezhad is a Canadian visual artist and painter. She attended Espahbodi Art Institute in Mashhad/Iran and had a comprehensive traditional and classical training in fine arts focused on drawing and painting from life. She received awards for her still life drawing and was commissioned to paint for the dean of Chemistry department at  Azad University in Mashhad.  

Since she had several interests to chase, she put a pause on her passion for painting and pursued study and work in the fileds of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering in Iran, Canada and UK. Her career in Chemical engineering took her traveling to several parts of the world. "Imagine if I had painted all the beautiful scenes I saw first hand.  Nevertheless," She was veered away from art by life circumstances  and only concentrated on her professional work.

"A couple of years ago, inadvertently, I opened my paint box. The more I painted, the more I revived my artistic nature and connected to my true self,  

I have been keeping my paint box open ever since." 

She updated her techniques through multiple programs at York University in Toronto and Stratford Institute in Montreal . She is a member of Art Gala Forum and displays her works in different galleries in the city of Toronto. She, also, is active on social media and demonstrate speed painting with different mediums on her YouTube channel "mariapolis".

Mary Paknezhad's paintings are renditions of her dreams, wishes, love, light, calmness and positive excitement. Her thought process, feelings and the state of being in the "now" reflects what she paints. 

As she get older and wiser, in an attempt to stay away from negative thoughts, she chose to portray hope, happiness  and love. That's why she focuses on beauty, nature, innocence of animals or color field that subliminally is pleasant to the senses. 

Being flexible working in different styles of painting, she mastered working on different subjects from nature and still life to portrait or figures. 

While she mostly does long studies, her preference is to capture the essence of the subject in a short study of gesture and motion. She describes her favorite word to be "obsession", because it leads to creativity. 

Mary Paknezhad is versatile and switch between different techniques and mediums with ease. Somehow it says about her personality that she likes experiencing different ways of expression. 

She enjoys working with all mediums. As an artist, she uses any medium that she can put her hands on to create fine arts; such as oil , acrylics, watercolor, pastels ,  pen, ink, charcoal and so on. 

She is also fond of mixed media  for it has allowed her to break traditional artistic restrictions.