Byron Zarrabi

You think you have mean tornadoes in Texas? Not when compared to the high flat lands of my native Persia......I saw one in my prairie one afternoon in the 1960's while visiting Dad's mother. Green-gray clouds rolling about 60ft overhead. We hit the storm cellar. Hail the size of grapefruit fell, denting our old truck a bit. Broke some windows on the north side of Granny's house. The anger of the storm went straight to my soul- I wanted to express it somehow. I couldn’t escape the anger; Soon after high school I was drawn into cage fighting. I was fast. I could throw a punch, and I learned to take one, too. But the violence of the fight did not satiate my hunger for expression. Like the storm it just lingered and swirled.                                                                                   

Then I found Steel. Sculpture, heat and fire.                                                                               

The rhythm of the movements brought the anger to the tips of my fingers I could go straight to the studio and the fingers would form the sculptures - I could feel the transference of the anger into art the energy moving like the electrons in the arc of my welder  - Byron Zarrabi