Anahita Eastwood: painter and ceramic sculptor in Surrey

From Tehran to Surrey

Anahita Eastwood was born in Tehran and settled in England as a teenager. She was five when she first watched her uncle, a painter, at his easel, and she has been drawing ever since. Her name means water in Persian, and her seas and skies have carried that meaning through a lifetime of practice.

The engineer who paints

Before painting became her working life, Anahita read industrial design engineering at Tehran University, then took a master’s at the University of Leicester, then a doctorate at the University of London where her thesis designed wheelchairs for children with spina bifida. She still says it plainly: she designs for people. When she moved from steel and fabric to canvas and clay, the same instinct went with her. She looks at a face, or a wave, or a shelf of pears the way an engineer looks at a mechanism: patiently, with a soft pencil, from every angle.

Colour, clay, and a home full of work

Her paintings sit in naturalism with a touch of romanticism, figurative first, and open out into seascapes, night skies, still life and quieter abstracts. The palette she returns to is deep and calm: cobalt, teal, warm ochre, a Pierrot white. Her ceramic wall masks and reliefs, glazed in cobalt, terracotta and verdigris, wear crowns of vine, grape and leaf. Her freestanding heads look you in the eye. The house she works in holds paintings on every wall and ceramics on every shelf, and most of the surfaces double as tables for the next thing being made.

Family, teaching, and the studio at home

Anahita has been married for over forty years, has two sons, and is a grandmother. She teaches adults in her Surrey home and children each week, and still attends her own weekly painting school, because a lifetime of practice never quite ends. She is warm, in love with life, and always taking notes. She is available for exhibitions and commissions, and welcomes visitors to her studio by appointment.

My friend, let us share together this journey through colours, forms and emotions. I have been drawing since I was a child, watching my uncle at his easel, and I have never wanted to stop. Painting for me is not a job. It is how I answer the world, and how I love it back. The sea, the night sky, a face I saw once and cannot forget: I try to hold them, and I try to give them to you. If any picture on this site speaks to you, please write to me. Let me be your guide in this journey of colours, feelings and emotions. Anahita

Anahita

In the sculpture studio

Anahita's ceramic work grows here: wall reliefs, masks and heads modelled in clay, crowned with vine, grape and leaf, glazed in cobalt, terracotta and verdigris. This piece, a winged head in the round, is in progress.