Red-Hot Passion

There is a lot of Firouzeh Karamlou in all of her sculptures, but few reveal her better than “Fragile but Strong.”

Both sculptor and sculpture invite assumptions with bold displays of graceful curves and delicate beauty.

But only those who look very closely see the essence--a core of steel. The sculpture, a high-heeled shoe adorned with delicate flanges of brass and copper, gets its power from a welded steel heel held fast by an industrial-sized bolt.

Karamlou’s own power is her steely self-confidence, and a passionate overdrive that has allowed her to bend the 9-to-5 bonds of the working world and focus on her sculptures.

“People settle for normal because it’s so hard to reach for more,” said the 39-year-old mother of two. “There is a lot of emptiness, a lot of shallowness in the world. I take a lot of risks in my life. I want to learn, to achieve, to be competitive, to become better.”

It leaves little time for leisure. She works as a artist and designer at American Geotechnical, a soil engineering firm based in Yorba Linda. A flexible work schedule and supportive bosses enable her to run her own gallery in the Santora Building of the Arts in downtown Santa Ana.

Sales of her metal sculptures have not made her rich or famous, but they do pay the bills for her Tustin home.

“She’s a wonder,” said Laverne Maresh, a close friend. “She’s had it pretty tough since she got divorced and set out on her own. But it’s a breath of sunshine for me to see how she’s made something of herself. That gal is smart as a whip. I love her dearly.”

Just over a decade ago, Karamlou was a scared single mother struggling to master the basics of survival in a strange country 7,600 miles from her home in Tehran. Born into a tightly knit, wealthy Iranian family, she grew up in a sheltered world, free to explore her passion for art. She sketched and painted and imagined marvelous creations made from scraps of metal at her father’s generator factory.

She married young, moved to Southern California and quickly found herself immersed in motherhood. There was little time for art. The marriage--a subject she seldom talks about--ended. The pain of the experience is clear in her artwork, though.

Independence and a Creative Streak

If not for a chance meeting with the grandmotherly Maresh at a community swimming pool, Karamlou might have retreated to her parents’ home in Tehran. The women met in the early 1980s when Karamlou brought her boys, Mark and Amir, to swimming lessons. Maresh was watching her granddaughter swim.

“When I first met that child, I knew she was from outer space,” Maresh laughed. “She had on 4-inch heels and was dressed like she was going out. I offered her a seat and we just started talking.”

Maresh quickly came to think of Karamlou as a daughter. She taught her how to write checks and pay bills. She explained the mysteries of American slang. “You don’t realize how much slang we speak,” Maresh said. “You know, ‘shake a leg,’ ‘outta sight.’ ”

Karamlou said Maresh’s crash course in American life helped forge her independence. She began with modeling, which she described as a mind-numbing profession that nevertheless taught her how to talk to people.

Later, she aced her real estate exam but found selling homes dull. She became a paralegal. Same problem. It’s not that Karamlou dislikes hard work--her frequent 14-hour days still cause Maresh to worry about Karamlou’s health.

It’s just that she couldn’t get art out of her head. She sketched in her spare time at work. She took road trips to museums, where she secretly fondled the sculptures of Rodin when security guards weren’t looking. She admired the courage of Picasso’s bold brush strokes for hours.

It was a trip to San Diego in the early 1990s that convinced Karamlou to pursue a career in art.

“I was walking in a store and I saw this waterfall, a really simple thing made out of copper,” she said. “I said to myself, ‘Oh my God, I can make much, much better things,’ and this thing was selling for thousands of dollars.”

Karamlou enrolled in welding classes at Orange Coast College, where she still bumps into her sons, now 19 and 17. There, she quickly earned the respect of her instructors. And if her art career doesn’t work out, her mentor says he’d still gladly recommend her for a welding job.

“She really has a knack for it,” said William Galverly, assistant professor of welding technology at the college. “What she puts together is sound. It’s not just thrown together. I make my artist students develop good welding skills before they start doing art because even if it’s art, it has to be structurally sound.”

For seven years now, Karamlou has perfected her welders art, often cutting and bending metal into the night. She loves the acrid taste of the smoke, the dirt and the glow of melting steel. Galverly often had to run her out of the campus shop at 10 p.m.

The creations in her mind began taking shape. In “Holding On,” a steel woman clings to a shattered heart freshly cut from her chest. Dense spirals crowd bold steel spires in a work titled “Domination.” In “Faith,” a small tree of brass and copper flanges is bent but unbroken in a storm.

In her gallery, Karamlou gracefully glides between the steel hulks, moving almost like a model on a runway as she shows off her “babies.”

She recently opened discussions to design a sculpture for Nazarene University in San Diego. Her gallery shows have drawn nice crowds. And she has finished a graphic design class, part of her unending education, so she can design fliers for future shows.

Karamlou enjoys her work for American Geotechnical, where she puts her drawing skills and excellent sense of perspective to use. If not for the support of her bosses, who encourage many employees to follow their art careers outside the office, she says, she would cast off the security of a steady paycheck and never look back.

“This is what I want,” she explained, pointing to the sculptures in her gallery. “My heart is there.”