About

Featured on the BBC and NPR, Nima's unique training as both scientist and artist informs his perspective. At the MIT Media lab, he researched how systems and the natural world could be decomposed from moving parts into layers of visual representation.  Training as scientist and engineer helped him develop his own instruments and enable his action painting technique, so that he can translate the many interacting layers of memory onto canvas.  

Training formally as artist as well, he differentiates his process through the unique ability to see time differently, an ability enabled by a rare memory condition called Hyperthymesia. This condition is known to affect only 50 people worldwide, and he is the only to paint using this ability. The process involves dozens of layers in order to achieve the dynamic textures that respond differently depending on the surrounding space and lighting.  He has trained at the Arts League of New York on 57th Street, The George Washington University, Georgetown University, Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nima Veiseh painting explores the dynamic nature of memory and its reflection of the human condition. His process is enabled by Hyperthymesia, an extremely rare condition of having highly superior memory -- an anomaly affecting 50 people worldwide, where he remembers every day of his life like film since the age of 15.   His work renders natural moments of transition and connectivity into artistic expression, by exploring subjects as they journey through time.   Hyperthymesia allows him to paint and see life in terms many layers. The dense overlays of paint involved in each piece, over 40 to 100 hours of continuous process spanning months, are true to the additive, integrated and ever changing nature of memory, and his technique is referential to gesturalism and abstractionism.

His story and who he is as a human is engrained in his art.  The contemporary abstract style requires filtering subjects into a single-dimension of space and time, and depicting them as real world artifacts on canvas. Each piece involves months of painstaking assembly over dozens of paint layers, that are a reference to the intangible complexity of everyday life, and how the structure of our memories affects our ability to perceive.  His process of repeated texturing and tempering overlays of paint is an allegory to the tenuous yet resilient structure of memory.  Both acrylic and spray paints are used, as his process involves injecting spray paint into acrylic to create deliberate ethereal textures, as well as working with his own homemade tools.  His artist training, coupled with his Hyperthymesia, enables Nima to bring back any series of memories and distill them as references in each layer of paint; for each layer is a uniquely decomposed memory, until finally the result is one holistic memory the way the observer sees it.