Siavash Kasrai was born in 1939 in Tehran. He spent most of his childhood in Khorasan province. He was 18 years old when he went to Kermanshah. In the same city, he started teaching painting under the supervision of a non-Iranian (probably American) teacher named Ms. Turner. He was twenty years old when he went to Austria to study art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He chose his painting style under the influence of the Viennese school.
At first, he mostly worked with oil paint technique, but his favorite technique was watercolor, and with this technique, he created a large number of works of art, and because of this period, he is famous for his works. These works mostly depict perspectives inspired by surrealist landscapes and are sometimes called "views of Siavashabad". The same title is the name of the movie that was made by Keyvan Alimohammadi and Omid Bonakdar in 2001 about this painter.
Kasrai landscapes sometimes have signs of Khorasan nature, but these works have different themes; From social themes to an image of the artist's mental world. This personal style along with his attachment to watercolor made him famous and accepted in Iranian art. Two works by Kasrai have been sold in Tehran auction.
Kasrai is a powerful painter whose poetic paintings show signs of authentic Iranian culture. He displays the wisdom hidden in his watercolors with the latest techniques he learned in Vienna with signs of Iranian culture, mysticism and his innate and esoteric knowledge. This hidden wisdom in his works originates from his passion for his deliberate solitude, which all comes from his perfected and poetic personality and mentality. He had prepared a great solitude for himself and did not prefer any intellectual gathering to his solitude, and as he learned from his teacher Ali Akbar Sanati, he never obeyed the thoughts and ideologies of the art market and was always bound by his own path. Therefore, he painted his imaginative works with full respect for the native culture and art of Iran and with his own poetry, and finally he was able to create oriental paintings, specific to his style and personal conclusions.
Siavash Kasrai died on July 8th, 2003 due to bronchitis in Tehran. He was 64 years old at the time of his death.