About Maria Paknezhad
Her Background
Maria loved to draw since she was a child. She attended Espahbodi Art Institute in Mashhad/Iran for four years and had a comprehensive classical training in fine arts focused on drawing and painting from life as well as color theory. 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 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" she regrets.
However, she was veered away from art by life circumstances and only concentrated on her professional work.
A couple of years ago, inadvertently, she opened her paint box. . The more she painted, the more she revived her artistic nature and "connected to her true self", she says. She has been keeping her 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.
Her Medium
Maria is versatile and switches between different techniques and mediums with ease. "Somehow it says about my personality that I like experiencing different ways of expression" she says.
She does 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.
Currently, she concentrates on oil as the medium and has already established herself as a successful oil painter.
Her Inspiration
Maria's paintings are renditions of her dreams, love, light, calmness and positive excitement. Her thought process, feelings and the state of being in the "now" reflects what she paints.
She says that as she gets older and wiser, in an attempt to stay away from negative thoughts, she chooses 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 has 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.