Дорога к себе Path to Himself Path to Himself

EVERY true artist knows everything about himself. And it begins very early. He divines his own fate; he always feels his own movement. The mother embroiders, and the five-year-old child takes a pencil and draws the pattern better than a grown-up. The force of a gift given by nature is like a horse dragging a captive behind it on a rope — run, or you will fall. The bowstring is released, the arrow flies to its target unchanged from beginning to end; the changes affect only its ballistic curve, not the arrow itself. It has been given to you, you exist — go forward!

The artist Rudolf Khachatryan is a philosopher. That, I think, is his chief trait. A boy from a poor Armenian family, a child of post-war Yerevan, draws on wrapping paper his poor house, the street, the stove with its kettle and saucepan, or his own shoe (like Van Gogh), and sees every object with some strange significance. He makes me, the viewer, stop and think: what is the matter, what is hidden in this saucepan or this shoe that I am supposed to look at them? I look closely (if I am really looking closely and not protesting inwardly against a "low" subject) and gradually I understand that I am being told something important about these things. And at last it dawns on me: these simple objects have been rendered with love — yes, with love and with astonishment at the significance of every thing in the world, at its place and its meaning. There is a saying, "the artist argues with his brush", but he also thinks with his brush.

Khachatryan's happy gift is drawing. We shall see neither painting nor watercolour nor sculpture, not only at his exhibition but in his studio either. He tried them, but they did not interest him; his arrow was flying, and still flies, at another target. Drawing! Drawing, drawing and again drawing! Khachatryan is intent and persistent, partial and consistent. At fifteen he draws drapery like a mature artist. He has no schooling; nobody teaches him and, it seems, nobody can teach him anything any longer. He comes into the class and draws the model "straight off", starting from the head. He neither understands nor listens to "how it ought to be done"; they laugh at him; he does not even know the first principles of anatomy. But there the model is, he exists, he is more than lifelike, and one can see that the author possesses both a feeling for form and knowledge, and that he "likes" being thorough and exact. And even this figure is for him not a dummy but a living person, and therefore is wrapped in softness and warmth.

From the earliest self-portrait a young man looks out at us, inspired and intelligent, thinking. The rhythm of the portrait, its volume, the firmness of the pen strokes — everything speaks of early maturity and singleness of purpose. It is as if he already knows all that is contained within himself, his own spirituality; he looks into himself in order to find out: who am I?

Great actors are not taught to act, nor great writers to write. As a rule, one is taught craft. Discovery cannot be "learned". And Khachatryan is moving towards discovery — that, properly speaking, is his road. Perhaps that is why it is so straight and even single-tracked. He will try himself in one thing and another, even in abstraction, but briefly; these will be impulses of youth, trials — he will all the while remain faithful to drawing.

But the young artist sees chiefly what he needs, what strengthens the vector of his direction. With the years, things discovered intuitively will find their formulation, and the conception will come down to this: sculpture has reached its absolutes, painting too — but drawing? The art of sculpture reached its highest points as early as ancient Greece (the Nike, the goddess of Victory, for instance): it was as though gods had moulded man in their own image and likeness, attaining a divine perfection. In the Renaissance painting reached its highest points — another form of visual art, having at its foundation the icon, the shroud bearing the imprint of the Saviour's face. Drawing, present in both of these arts, always played, as it were, an auxiliary role. Pencil and paper are the instruments of sketches, of studies, and of works that in the whole history of painting have only rarely stood on their own. Loving drawing, devoted to it alone, Khachatryan seeks to prove its great power, its still hidden possibilities; he knows that his own road lies here.

From the age of twenty he does dozens of portraits, achieving ever greater expressiveness, precision, search for the image, softness. The portrait becomes dominant in his work, pushing aside landscape, in which the artist gradually loses interest. In general he loses interest in whatever has "come off", whatever has been achieved, whatever has yielded to him — and that too is a sign of high talent. Only a craftsman, having seized a single feather of the firebird, hides it in a sack and is satisfied with that for ever, reproducing his personal record, achieved for himself alone. High talent knows no ceiling, and must know none. Yes, the masterpiece is undoubtedly the target at which the arrow flies. But by the moment it strikes the target its force is not spent; on the contrary, it increases, and it pierces its target in order to fly on. This is the principle of creative work, the "bicycle principle": while you ride you stay up; stop, and you fall.

By the age of thirty the artist seems to have mastered everything; he has paid his dues to everything; he has achieved much in the art of the still life and especially of the portrait. A word about the still life. Exactly as in his early youth, the artist, taking into his hands (one wants to say: into his eyes) any object whatever and making it the object of his artistic vision, feels it with still greater force as something extraordinary, singular, unique. The artists of the Renaissance were pantheists; for them the divine was dissolved in the world, and God was in every blade of grass, every ant, every rock, every cloud — hence their careful working of every detail in a picture. For them there were no trifles, no insignificant things. Everything was of equal significance and demanded equal attention. Khachatryan too makes equals, in his still lifes, of a besom and a book, a violin and a mortar, a living onion and a dead fish.

It seems that for him the resistance of material is nothing: he can combine, almost organically, five different metals in a single still life and prove that his drawing has command of everything, of any shade, of any surface. But I am running ahead...

AND SO, there is some boundary, there are targets already pierced — and here doubt begins. Dissatisfaction. Anxiety. The question: what next?..

The light once glimpsed has still not been embodied; the warmth once absorbed has still not been given back; a sea of love beats within its own shores with no outlet; and jewel-like craftsmanship begins to draw attention to itself rather than to the object depicted. And this is repugnant to Khachatryan the "classic": he is too ascetic and severe, too devoted to art, to put his own "I" in front of nature. I have said already that this was one of his early and, as it were, personal discoveries: great art can be anonymous, and it is even better if it is anonymous — the author must dissolve in what he has created. The modernists went out of their minds: they forgot the purpose of art, they took up their own "I" and trained the public to pay attention not to what is reflected in the mirror but to the mirror itself, to its frame: "Oh, look what an interesting mirror!" (And the mirror is interesting even without that, without a frame.)

By this time the art of the pencil portrait really does reach its peak. It is worth comparing one portrait of 1973 ("Nadya"), very exact, alive, charming, with the later portraits of 1977 ("Woman in a Turban"). One can see what lofty and refined mastery the artist attained in a few years. The charm and grace of these portraits of women, wrapped in mystery and loveliness, are already almost at the verge of touch and of the reproduction of the image itself. Look closely at this hair, these eyes, these lips, at this pallor that comes from the artist's passionate wish to convey to us light, volume, colour. He is almost breathless; something is happening to him — can this be the ceiling? Paper and pencil have exhausted themselves, and the task is this: drawing can, and must, acquire the materiality of painting, the volume of sculpture (which painting in its own time attained). Paper does not radiate such light, a pencil does not give such warmth. It gives, it gives — but not the warmth that a boy accustomed to the sun of Armenia has known since childhood.

And here comes a discovery, a coincidence. The artist finds his material. He positively dives into it as into his "own", at last discovered element, which has the temperature that matches the temperature of your body. Khachatryan begins to work on levkas (a kind of gesso ground, chalk; and the graphite of the sepia so beloved by the artist seems to fuse, to be soldered into the chalk of the levkas, forming one substance).

He finds a second wind. Levkas gives off a light that paper does not know and of which the artist had dreamed so long. Brown sepia acquires the many colours of a palette — from almost red to almost black. The drawing boldly puts on the dress of painting; it freely abandons its accustomed flatness and acquires volume, perspective, depth, a new life.

It is easy to compare the one with the other: the superb miniatures on paper, and the portraits created on the new material. How much richer, freer and more vibrant the latter are. Time, space, place — everything is contained in, and combined into, an image of extreme realism. Everything is pressed to the limit, the background is removed, camouflaging accessories are brought in so as not to distract the viewer into over-concrete guesses. Time, space, place — everything must be enclosed directly in what is depicted, in the person or the object, which, once the artist has taken them into account, must acquire fullness, the utmost fullness of truth of which depiction is capable. As though exulting, playing, feasting on his own Day of Discovery, the artist sets himself tasks and copes with them: the nude, a view through a window, another window through whose faceted diamond a child gazes out into the vast world, still lifes with the most complex, formal compositions of the highest difficulty, which, it seems, can be fully appreciated only by professionals; and more and more new portraits, also of a new and newer difficulty, but of another kind: as if testing himself, Khachatryan paints people whose individuality is not easy to seize or to convey. He is drawn to the secrets of people of art, of scholars, creators and intellectuals, actors, composers, painters.

But in essence, I repeat, here too he strives for anonymity. Perhaps his most significant works — those that tell us so much about human character, about people of bustle and people of calm (as I would call them), about the dark and the light in a human being — bear conventional titles: "Caravan-bashi", "The Pilgrim", "Profile". Yet these are his finest, fullest works, created to the whole breadth of thought and feeling. How much purity there is in "Eve", how much love, smiling and kindness in "Moko", what a piercingly complex, dangerous soul is enclosed in the fantastically conveyed gaze of the Caravan-bashi alone! The artist seems to have freed himself, to have drawn breath, having broken through to real work, striving towards his other "I", the artist's "I" — the spiritual one, full of love for people and for the world.

Love? Love alone? I do not know... His latest self-portrait the artist joins, as it were, into one with the portrait of his wife. The first is resolved darkly and severely, the second is full of femininity and light. The male image and the female — the closest, naturally, to the artist. It takes a courage of its own, too, to speak about oneself like this, openly and clearly. The feminine principle radiates kindness and tenderness, the masculine — firmness and intelligence. The artist looks at us benevolently, but also demandingly; he is severe in his view of the world, he is restrained and exact, he knows our weaknesses, he demands human quality. And he stands guard over femininity, beauty and light... What happiness it is to be oneself, to be aware of one's mastery, to fathom and fathom anew the mysteries of life — and yet to understand that there are things you yourself will never know. But to go there all the same, to penetrate, to enrich oneself with ever new and unexpected knowledge: looking at himself, a man comes to know the world, as the old truth has it — yes, the artist looks at himself in each of those he depicts, and each time he gives himself wholly in order to recreate another wholly; not a particle, not a crumb must be given, no, everything must be thrown in to get what is needed. And not even to "get" it, but so that it "comes off". In essence, this alone is the artist's life, his daily aim: that it should "come off".

For those who are true to themselves, who never tire of "discovering" what nature has laid down in them, it does come off.

Look back and you will see: so far everything is going as you thought it would. As you knew it would when you were still a boy. And so it will go on, as it should. This is a road. Now you have climbed high and you can see further. That is all there is to it.