My view
My name is Sattar Fartousi. I was born in Iraq. I have studied art in Bagdad Fine Arts Institute; Visual Arts for five years. I worked in the field of art for more than 10 years in Iraq untill I left.
I moved to Jordan. There I was working with my "second profession" as a music teacher. But I still kept on painting, because it fulfills my needs of survival.
Since I came to Finland, I have been working as a freelancer. I have participated in many international exhibitions and biennales. And because of those, many people here in Finland and Europe own collections of my paintings.
Art has been and always will be the dream project of my life! Or should I say, it is an alternative way of thinking, it is a solution to a puzzle. In my mind, art is beauty and a psychological balance to both society and individuals.
My message in my art is to combine the consciousness and the subconscious. The combination is very important. I think that all visions, pictures, sounds, we store them in our minds. Then we combine them to create an image out of our experience. I mean all of our experiences in visions, sounds or other wise physical.
I mean that the image we create in our minds has a lot to do with subconscious. We store different kinds of images to our brain during our life, but how to present them? Aesthetic is important, because in art you have to surprise people and your only tool of surprising others is beauty.
Other thing of importance in my art is the figure. I don't mean the figure of itself, but the glory of the figure. A man needs to see and analyze things. Since I deal with visual art, I have to make my message to some extant clear. My creating imaginary figure and making out of it in an abstract way, the subject that I want it to be.
As an artist I experience life in a different way. So my life in Iraq was different than it was in Jordan and then again what it is in Finland. In life I always follow my instinct and my sensibility. I believe that sensibility receive faster than knowledge.
My experience in Finland as an artist is a rich experience. It is melted with calm and peace. I already know what I want to do. Some other places of the world that I have lived in, was not as good as here in Finland.
But the subjective equivalent is always the exile. My life in exile is something that I cannot express by words and even not in paintings. It comes as if I do not want it to come, it is always like this. Maybe because as I said, I depend on sensibility more than I depend on knowledge and other methods.