February 18, 2017

Ep. #178: Maysha Mohamedi, Los Angeles-based artist and recent transplant from San Francisco, on leaving The Sunset (neighborhood) to get some sun

1 hour 19 minutes

L.A.-based artist and recent S.F. resident Maysha Mohamedi talks about:

What she likes to listen to in the studio (over and over) while she's working on a body of paintings; her time in SF, where she started her art career, met her husband and had two kids before leaving for L.A. (where she's been since August '16); her switch from a PhD in neuroscience at UC Davis to art; her aversion to critical conversations about her work, which started in grad school and didn't end until after she was showing; we have a long exchange about abstraction (mostly thanks to my taking so long to ask the question I wanted to ask), and she clearly articulates her objective- of getting her viewers to feel emotions, to be moved,when they see her work—and she uses the analogy of music, specifically Nina Simone, that she aspires to move her viewers the way Nina Simone's music moves her; how her parents have been supportive of her as an artist in their own ways, such as her dad making a custom studio-sitting bench for her; her origin story of when she decided to become a mother, something she's 'always' wanted to do, and why; she weighs in as a parent on those who aren't parents, and (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) how she'd like to lord her superiority of being a parents over non-parents, for the time-being at least; and she explains how when she's in the studio, the only thing she's thinking about his her work—no exceptions.

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