Дорога к себе Path to Himself

Every authentic artist knows everything about himself. And this knowledge comes early. He sees his fate in a clear cut perspective and is constantly aware of his progress. The mother is embroidering, and a fice year old child, taking a pencil, produces a better design than a grown-up. The force inherent in a natural gift is akin to a horse, dragging a prisoner behind her - he has to run, otherwise he will fall down. The bow-string is released, and the arrow flies to its target unchanged, changes occurring only in the ballistic curve, but not in the arrow itself. You have it in you, you are - so shoot!

The artist Rudolf Khachatrjan is a philosopher. This is the most important thing about him, as I see it. A boy from a poor Armenian family, a child of post-war Erevan uses wrapping paper to draw his shabby house, street, stove with a kettle or pan, or his shoe (like Van Gogh] and sees an odd polysemy in everything. He sets me thinking: why is it that. I can't help looking at the pan or the shoe, what is hidden in them? I take a closer look (if I do not inwardly resent the "low" subject) and gradually develop an awareness that something important is going to be communicated to me. And ultimately a realizion dawns upon me: all these objexts are drawn with love, yes, with love, the artist wondering at the significance and place of every thing in the world. There is a saying "an artist argues using his brush", but he also thinks with it!

Drawing is Khachatrjan`s gift. We will not see paintings, water colours or sculptures not only at his one-man show, but in his studio as well.

He has tried his hand at all that, but neither of the media has caught his fancy, his arrow aiming at a different target. Drawingl And only drawing! Khachatrjan is both intent and persistent, partial and consistent. At the age of fifteen he draws draperies like a mature master. He has no academic background, there is nothing he can be taught. He comes to a class and draws the model beginning with the head. He can not understand and is not listening to what is "the proper way" to do it, he is sniggered at, he does not know ever the fundamentals of anatomy.

But the model is here, he exists and he is more than true to life and apparently the artist has both a sense of form and knowledge and he likes being thourough and precise. Even this figure is not a dummy but a human being, surrounded with warmth and tenderness.

An inspired and intelligent boy is looking at us from his first early portrait.

The rhythm, dimensionality and firmness of the line in the portrait speaks of an early maturity and purposefulness of the young artist. He seems to be aware of everything about himself, of his spirituality, and he peers into himself to elicit the answer to the questions who am I?

Great actors are not taught to act, nor are great writers taught to write.

Mastery is the thing to be taught. "Revelation" can not be taught. Khachatrjan is moving towards revelation, that is path he has taken. That may be the reason it is so straight. He is going to try his hand at thisaand that, even at abstract art, but these trial impulses will be short-lived, the artist remaining true to drawing.

But for the most part the young artist sees what he needs and what strengthens the vector of the chosen direction. With years his intuitive discoveries will get their definitions and his concept will be formulated like twis: sculpture has reached is absolute, the same is true of painting, but what about drawing? The art of sculpture reached its pinnacle in ancient Greece (Nike - the goddess of victory, for example) - gods seemed to be fashioning man after their own image, achieving devine perfection. The pinnacle of painting goes back to the Renaissance, painting being another form of artistic expression based on iconpainting and the mantle bearing the image of Savior. Though drawing was always present in cne or another art, its role was only secondary. Pencil and paper have mostly been employed to draw sketches and have only rarely been used to accomplish independent creations. Devoted to art Rudolf Khachatrjan strives to bring out its power and latent potential, he is sure that his path lies here. In the numerous portraits which he began to paint at the age of twenty, he has always aimed at greater expressiveness, precision, tenderness and integrity of image.

Portrait becomes the artist's favourite genre ousting lanscape, in which he gradully loses interest, like in everything that has been achieved and has surrendered to him. This is also a sign of talent. Only a craftsman would hide the cnly feather of the fire-bird, he happened to get, into a sack and, content evereafter, would copy his personal record which he has beaten for himself.

Authentic talent knows not of any limits and should not know of them.

A masterpiece may doubtlessly be identified with tee target the arrow is aiming at. Though by the moment it hits it, its strength does not diminish, but mounts, so that piercing the target it flies on. This is the credo of creation, "the principle of the bicycle: "you don't fall off the bicycle only if you keep going".

By the time he was thirty the artist seemed to have mastered everything, paid tribute to everything; he had accomplished a lot in the art of still-life and portrait, in particular.

Speaking about still-lives, like in his youth the artist would sensitizes himself to any object he takes into his hands (I was tempted to say-into his eyes) to make it an object ofhhis artistic vision and treat it as something extraordinary and unique.

The Renaissance artists were pantheists for whom the dae devine was dissolved in the world and God existed in every blade of grass, ant, rock or cloud - hence the detiled quality of their pictures. Nothing seemed too small or insignificant for them. Every thing was equally important and deserved equal attention. Khachatrjan also levels a broom to a book, a violin to a mortar, and onion to a dead fish in his still-lives.

The material seems to offer no resistance: he can naturally combine five different metals in one still-life to prove that his drawing is omnipotent, embracing all shades of colour and surface. But I am running ahead of myself.

Thus, when a task is set, and some targets have been hit, doubts set in. Hesitations, anxiety and the question: what comes next?

The light once seen has not yet been realized, the warmth once absorbed has not been given away, the sea of love is splashing within it bounds, finding no release., and the fine mastery takes the attention off the object of portrayal onto itself. But, being a classic, Khachatrjan can not accept it, he is too ascetic and austere and too devoted to art to put his "ego" before nature.

I have already said that it was one of his early and personal discoveries: great art can even be anonymous, it is even better that way, as the author much sink into his creation. Modernists seem all to have gone crasy having forgotten the designation of art, they have become preoccupied with themselves and taught the public to look not at the reflection in the mirror, but at the mirror or the frame: "Ah, look, what an interesting mirror!" (But the mirror is interesting as such, without its frame).

By this time the art of pencil portrait had really reached its peak. The comparison of a portrait drawn in 1973 ("Nadja") which is very precise, lively and charming and the later portraits of 1977 (i. e. "The woman in a Turban") reveals the lofly and elegant mastery attained by the artist within these several years. The charm and grace of these mystery-wrapped female portraits add a quality of tangibility and make them graphic. Take a closer look at the hair, eyes, lips, at this pallor originating from the artist's pass ionate desire to put across light, volume and colour.

He is nearly out of breath, something is happening to him - is this the limit? Paper and pencil have exhausted their possibilities, and the task is to enable drawing to acquire the material quality inherent in painting, the dimensionality inherent in sculpture (which painting also possessed.) Paper does not radiate such light, and pencil does not have such warmth. They carry some warmth and light, but not the warmth and light the Armenian boy used to know in his childhood.

And then there occurs a discovery, a coincidence. The artist finds his medium. He plunges into his "own" element which he has at last found, its temperature being his own body temperature. Khachatrjan begins drawing on levkas (it is a kind of priming, chalk; and black lead or sepia. Which the artist is faithful to, seems to blend with and merge into one with the chalk of levkas.)

Second wind comes. Levkas radiates the long-sought light which has never been known to be radiated by paper. Brown sepia acquires the multi-coloured diversity of the palette - ranging from red to black. Drawing is boldly clothed in the garment of painting, it freely dispenses with its flatness and acquires volume, perspective, depth, and a new life. One can easily be compared to the other: exquisite miniatures on paper and portraits created in a new material. How much freer, richer, and better adjusted to life the latter arel The realistic image seems to embrace and incorporate time, space, and place. Everything is reduced to a minimum the background is removed, camouflaging gimmicks are used to keep the viewer from being distracted by concrete solutions. Time, space, place - all of these are to be within the represented object or man, which after becoming models are to acquire the ampleness of truth. Jubilant and elated, the artist, feasting on account of his Discovery, sets himself new tasks and solves them: a nude, a view from a window, another window through the faceted diamond of which a child is looking at the vast world, still-lives whose most sophisticated, formal compositions can be appreciated to the full only by professionals, more portraits, each intricate in its own way, though this intricacy is of a different quality. As if testing himself Khachatrjan draws people whose individuality is not easy both to capture or express. He is fascinated by the mysteries of men of art, с sientists, creators, intellectuals, actors, composers, artists.

But here again he is after anonymity. The most remarkable of his works which tell us a lot about human character, about vain men and wise men, about the good and evil in man have names like "Caravan-bashi", "Pilgrim", "Profile". They are the best and most profound of his creations, where thought and feeling are revealed at their utmost point. How pure "Eve" is, how full of love, smile and good "Mocko" is, what piercingly complicated and dangerous soul is reflected in Caravan-bashi's look of fanatic devotion. The artist seems to have gained liberation, taken a breath of fresh air having begun real work, and set our towards his alter ego, artistic and spiritual, full of love for people and the world.

Love? Love alone? I am not sure... His latest self-portrait and the one of his wife seem to blend into one whole. The first is very austere and done in dark shades and the second is full of tenderness and light. The male and female representations are very close to the artist. It does take quts to speak about oneself in such a straightf oward manner. The female element breathes tenderness and kindness, the male - firmness and intelligence.

The artist is looking at us good-humouredly and at the same time demandingly, he is strict, reserved and precise, he knows our weaknesses, he demands human quality. And protects tendenness, feminity, beauty and light... How wonderful it is to be aware of oneself and one's mastery, and percieve and comprehend anew the mysteries of life, realizing their elusiveness. And still he probes deeper, enriching himself with a new and unexpected knowledge - looking at himself man comprehends the world, as the old saying has it, yes, the artist looks at himself in every one of the people he represents, giving himself up fully each time to reconstruct the other: you have to give up everything, not a fraction, or a part of yourself, to get at what you are after. It would be more correct to say "to achieve your goal. "

This it what the artist is after daily and what seems to be the aim of his life: to achieve his goal.

Those faithful to themselves who are never bored by attempts to discover what nature has endowed them with do achieve it.

Look round and you will see that everything seems to be going your way. And it will carry on like this. This is your path. Now you have risen high and see farther. That is all there is to it.

M. ROSHIN