<p>Iranian Marjane Satrapi is famous for her films and graphic novels, but it is her painting which keeps her sane, she told AFP.</p>.<p>The artist who was nominated for an Oscar for "Persepolis", based on her graphic novel on post-revolution Iran, started out as a painter.</p>.<p>And that is what she always returns to after writing and shooting films like "Chicken with Plums" and last year's biopic of Marie Curie, "Radioactive".</p>.<p>"Painting is about going back to the origin of what I liked doing. And my mental health depends on it," she said in her Paris studio with its view across the rooftops to Montmartre's Sacre Coeur.</p>.<p>In fact Satrapi has become so French -- she hasn't been back to Tehran in two decades -- that she has rather taken to Parisians' famous foul humour.</p>.<p>Her giant canvases feature striking women like her with red lips and manes of jet black hair.</p>.<p>"I really like honest, ferocious women," said Satrapi, 50, who has always worn her feminism on her sleeve.</p>.<p>Their sharp contrasts also echo the drawings in her bestselling graphic novels.</p>.<p>"I like figurative painting the most. Like the Old Masters, I would like to fill the public need for beauty."</p>.<p>Despite Covid-19, and the risk of another lockdown, she is showing 16 of her paintings in the Francoise Livinec gallery in Paris next month.</p>.<p>None of them features men because according to Satrapi, men are just too damn "ugly" to paint.</p>.<p>"All that badly shaved skin. The male peacock may be more beautiful than the female, but with humans it's the women who are much prettier," she declared.</p>.<p>Despite her own long history of outspokenness, Satrapi insisted that she is "against all kinds of radicalism where they want to burn everything down.</p>.<p>"Feminism is all about doing. If I show that I can do something too, even better than a man, I have won the fight and I also set an example," said the writer, who described herself as a "big mouth who knows how to defend herself".</p>.<p>But she also hates what she calls a new hypocritical and moralising strain of feminism, "people who are looking for a new kind of religion", Satrapi claimed.</p>.<p>"This moralising side really pisses me off. I don't want to be called a killer for eating a chicken," she added, saying she was against people's lives being forced into "formats" .</p>.<p>If "secularism becomes a religion as intolerant as extremist religion, then it's abject," she argued.</p>.<p>For Satrapi humour is essential and a key "expression of human intelligence. Life is about losing everything. You die like a worm or a cat -- if we can't laugh about all that, we are beyond stupid."</p>.<p>And before she goes herself, Satrapi said she wants to have made eight films, five exhibitions and four books. I have a plan for the next 30 years," she joked.</p>.<p>As for her homeland, Satrapi said she no longer "feels credible" in commenting on it.</p>.<p>She misses terribly the warmth of "its hospitality, the Elburz mountains and Farsi jokes... and its poetry,the purest form of expression.</p>.<p>"We are the only people who, when we want to be really understood, quote Saadi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam.</p>.<p>"A people whose mausoleums for its poets are fuller than its mosques cannot be bad," she said.</p>
<p>Iranian Marjane Satrapi is famous for her films and graphic novels, but it is her painting which keeps her sane, she told AFP.</p>.<p>The artist who was nominated for an Oscar for "Persepolis", based on her graphic novel on post-revolution Iran, started out as a painter.</p>.<p>And that is what she always returns to after writing and shooting films like "Chicken with Plums" and last year's biopic of Marie Curie, "Radioactive".</p>.<p>"Painting is about going back to the origin of what I liked doing. And my mental health depends on it," she said in her Paris studio with its view across the rooftops to Montmartre's Sacre Coeur.</p>.<p>In fact Satrapi has become so French -- she hasn't been back to Tehran in two decades -- that she has rather taken to Parisians' famous foul humour.</p>.<p>Her giant canvases feature striking women like her with red lips and manes of jet black hair.</p>.<p>"I really like honest, ferocious women," said Satrapi, 50, who has always worn her feminism on her sleeve.</p>.<p>Their sharp contrasts also echo the drawings in her bestselling graphic novels.</p>.<p>"I like figurative painting the most. Like the Old Masters, I would like to fill the public need for beauty."</p>.<p>Despite Covid-19, and the risk of another lockdown, she is showing 16 of her paintings in the Francoise Livinec gallery in Paris next month.</p>.<p>None of them features men because according to Satrapi, men are just too damn "ugly" to paint.</p>.<p>"All that badly shaved skin. The male peacock may be more beautiful than the female, but with humans it's the women who are much prettier," she declared.</p>.<p>Despite her own long history of outspokenness, Satrapi insisted that she is "against all kinds of radicalism where they want to burn everything down.</p>.<p>"Feminism is all about doing. If I show that I can do something too, even better than a man, I have won the fight and I also set an example," said the writer, who described herself as a "big mouth who knows how to defend herself".</p>.<p>But she also hates what she calls a new hypocritical and moralising strain of feminism, "people who are looking for a new kind of religion", Satrapi claimed.</p>.<p>"This moralising side really pisses me off. I don't want to be called a killer for eating a chicken," she added, saying she was against people's lives being forced into "formats" .</p>.<p>If "secularism becomes a religion as intolerant as extremist religion, then it's abject," she argued.</p>.<p>For Satrapi humour is essential and a key "expression of human intelligence. Life is about losing everything. You die like a worm or a cat -- if we can't laugh about all that, we are beyond stupid."</p>.<p>And before she goes herself, Satrapi said she wants to have made eight films, five exhibitions and four books. I have a plan for the next 30 years," she joked.</p>.<p>As for her homeland, Satrapi said she no longer "feels credible" in commenting on it.</p>.<p>She misses terribly the warmth of "its hospitality, the Elburz mountains and Farsi jokes... and its poetry,the purest form of expression.</p>.<p>"We are the only people who, when we want to be really understood, quote Saadi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam.</p>.<p>"A people whose mausoleums for its poets are fuller than its mosques cannot be bad," she said.</p>