E Sistan was born in Paris, France, in the 1970s. She moved to London in 2000 and has made it her home since then. She is a self-taught London-based artist whose abstract work tends toward minimalism.
She started painting 6 years ago, driven by a desire to create, initially using oil and acrylic on very large format. Most of her work today is ink on paper, with the creative process being guided by the meditative gesture of dipping the nib in the inkwell. She loves the feeling and texture of handmade paper and the sound of the metal nib on it. She occasionally still works with oil and acrylic on canvas.
She is inspired by the ideas of Rorschach: you project yourself, your history and what you are drawn to on what you see. Unlike Rorschach however, her art is not a test, and there is no wrong – or for that matter, right – answer.

A simple form is nothing on its own. In my artworks, I strive to bring beauty in togetherness. What was once unremarkable alone is now intriguing as part of a larger body. All that is needed is a blank sheet of paper, a nib and some ink, and a completely unique work of art emerges from individual strokes. As the spontaneity of the gesture takes over, a meditative state emerges leaving emptiness dialoguing with plenitude. I create works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective, large entanglements with tiny strokes, all essentially in sync with each other. The repetitive gesture from which my monochromes emerge leaves you meandering. The blanks are not an inert presence, they are the breathing spaces.
I mainly works with ink, reproducing the millennial gesture of dipping the nib in the inkwell.

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