Varuzhan Vardanyan was, together with the prematurely deceased Minas, the artist on a film. The basement hall where their studies and sketches were displayed for the production team filled for a day or two with the play of warm colours, the beauty of the real and unreal world, with light. Minas’s hands, those of a house-owning peasant and restless painter, working everywhere and at every moment, naturally left none of his work to anyone else. But all the hall’s “paint”—the worn chapels, paths, weary earth, rock eaten by time, bushes blazing with late autumn’s red—belonged wholly to Varuzhan. A young, almost adolescent painter, he seemed to have made an effort to please the master and all the “directors” without fail, just as their pair of painters later strove to communicate their understanding of beauty and national character to the work in which they participated: first by their rights as painters, then through the independent existence of themselves and their art, almost from the side.
Of course we are all a little like girls, and all want everyone to like us. But for Varuzhan this was not merely an effort; first of all it was the quality and ability of relating to beauty. Even if he were drawing on sea sand, with only his forefinger and only for himself, he would still strive to draw beautifully without fail, and without fail to please… whom?
He is an artist in his essence; artistry radiates from his marrow, and in his mind he naturally has halls full of spectators. In those halls are masters of word and brush from the past, the present and tomorrow: that is whose approval Varuzhan seeks.
He knows their worth; those “genius serfs” of word, brush and burin always exist for him. His splendid note on his elder colleague, “Minas in My Gaze,” his few published articles and a poem, his spoken descriptions of this or that artist, where each word and expression almost precisely materialises, his excellent knowledge of world culture and ability to find his own bearings in that shoreless sea all testify that Varuzhan, brush in hand, must constantly answer to the great culture of the present and past. This is of course a kind of inquisition, implying a hard condition for any artist, yet it cannot be otherwise, particularly if you entered art determined to stamp your hand’s imprint on the marble of great culture.
In our open, cruel and just times, when some artist of another continent and language pushes your book, as an Armenian artist, away from your Armenian reader and places his own work there, without great ambitions it is not even worth taking up a pen, burin or brush. Another name for this examined, inquisitorial condition of creating before everyone and for everyone, this demand never to lose the standard of great art, is a sense of honour: honour towards one’s own work. Today among us it is, sadly, a commodity sought and not found. Figures in culture and other fields who could command respect at least through the care put into their work appear in public with “faithless,” uncertain, unfinished works. Genius is not given to everyone, but neither is the ability to distinguish genius from a good craftsman’s well-made work.
Varuzhan’s canvases are worked, sometimes even overworked, sometimes even tormented. Yet in both cases, whether the breath of life plays across the whole canvas or has not stirred, or remains in the folds of many layers, they may not necessarily be lovable, but neither are they contemptible. Over all of them a restless man dissatisfied with himself, well acquainted with the nature of things and people, has suffered, “worked magic,” hoped, invested his entire store of knowledge and instinct, to summon life out of lifelessness. At least it seems that nature’s effort expended upon those things and people and the painter’s effort invested in recreating them are equivalent.
In our time, when on one hand it seems that among the world’s thousands of painters you have not only variations but exact counterparts already doing what you intend to do, and on the other humanity’s thirst for beauty is satisfied by countless, endless transformations; in this age of dispersing the painter’s attention and diverting public attention from painting itself, it would seem not worth “indulging” the classical so much within oneself, constantly answering to the great and the “difficult,” believing and toiling so much, like the great figures of old believing times. But then Varuzhan would simply be faithless before the temple of art, when the opposite is true. In his canvases there is firm conviction that peoples are not merely distinguished by their arts but live through them; that humanity’s continual ascent is an eternal march towards true beauty, reliably embodied first of all in painting, and perhaps only in painting. And therefore painting should feel the seriousness and responsibility of its mission beneath every brush.
And so: there was no painter named Varuzhan Vardanyan; now there is. There were no such canvases; now there are. Slowly but stubbornly, like cold forging, they unfold and establish their place within our being.
Very often, when I become powerless before the problems of history, life and the future, and despair takes hold of me, in those heavy hours the truly great figures of culture stand behind me: Tumanyan and others who embody beauty’s finished perfection. Among them, and first of all, is the Master, Saryan. A visit to his museum, a leafing through his reproduction albums or book of notes, gives a charge of warmth, faith and knowledge that stays with you for weeks. I am convinced that at least one such day in your life and mine is reserved for the painter Varuzhan Vardanyan: the already realised, present Varuzhan and the Varuzhan of the future.
14 March 1986