For press

One line

Warm, colour-led paintings and glazed ceramic masks from a Surrey studio, made by an engineer who has drawn since childhood: figures, seas and night skies.

Short biography (about 25 words)

Warm, colour-led paintings and glazed ceramic masks from a Surrey studio, made by an engineer who has drawn since childhood: figures, seas and night skies.

Medium biography (about 75 words)

Anahita Eastwood is a painter and ceramic sculptor in Surrey. Born in Tehran and settled in England since her teens, she came to painting through her uncle's easel and to ceramics through a lifetime of practice. Her work is naturalist with a touch of romanticism: figures, seas, night skies, still life, and glazed wall masks crowned with vine and grape.

Long biography (about 200 words)

Anahita means water. She has painted seas and skies for as long as she can remember, and something in that name has stayed with her work. She was five when she first watched her uncle, a painter, at his easel in Tehran, and settled into that seat for good. She 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 has lived in England since her teens. She says it plainly: she designs for people. When she moved from steel and fabric to canvas and clay, the same instinct went with her. Her paintings sit in naturalism with a touch of romanticism, figurative first, and open out into seascapes, night skies, still life and quieter abstracts. 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. She has been married for over forty years, has two sons, and is a grandmother. She teaches adults at her kitchen table in Surrey and a weekly group of children, and still attends her own painting school, because a lifetime of practice never quite ends. She is warm, in love with life, and always taking notes. Her studio at home holds paintings on every wall and ceramics on every shelf. She is available for exhibitions and commissions, and welcomes visitors by appointment.

Facts (short list)

• Working name. Anahita Eastwood
• Full name. Anahita Eastwood Salahpoosh Shirvani
• Discipline. painting and ceramic sculpture
• Based. Surrey, England
• Languages. English and Persian
• Education. BA, Industrial Design Engineering, Tehran University; MA, Industrial Design Engineering, University of Leicester; PhD, Wheelchair design for children with spina bifida, University of London
• Machine-readable facts. /facts.json

Story angles

1. From wheelchairs to seascapes. How a doctoral thesis in industrial design (a wheelchair for children with spina bifida) became a lifetime's painting and ceramics practice.
2. Colour, clay and a home studio. The Surrey kitchen table where adults paint alongside a weekly children's group.
3. The Persian mark. How growing up in Tehran, and coming to England as a teenager, shows up in the palette and the mythology of the work.
4. Ceramic masks with vine crowns. The wall masks and reliefs, glazed in cobalt, terracotta and verdigris, and what they owe to older stories.
5. Buying a first painting. How the pricing formula works, and why the catalogue is a way in for people who have never bought art before.

Press kit

A single ZIP with the five press-quality portraits (2400 px JPEGs), the short, medium and long biographies as plain text, the facts sheet and a short licence for editorial use.

Download the press kit (ZIP)

Contact

Please write to the studio with your deadline and the shape of the piece. Anahita reads press enquiries personally; the studio replies within a day or two.

Write to the studio