Creating art is an alternate means of communicating with an audience. Using both powerful and subtle images, an artist can ask questions for which he himself seeks an answer, or provide answers through which he seeks to incite questions. As an artist therefore, I work to create art that will go beyond simple visual appeal and provoke thoughts and reflections in the viewer.
My Alphabet Painting Series,“Un Corpo Molte Lingue”(One Body Many Languages), based on a Pacifist Philosophy and an appreciation for Internationalism. Each piece in the series advocates mutual understanding among members of our single, diversified human family.
One of the central themes in the series is the idea that we can only gain respect and understanding by learning and communicating with different cultures, never by force.
I grew up in the former USSR, (Currently Russian Federation, Armenia), a beautiful “melting pot” of over 200 distinct ethnic groups. Each ethnic group coexisted peacefully using one unifying Russian language and a secondary national language. With influence from outside sources, and the aid of corrupted government officials however, the melting pot reached its boiling point and vaporized into an array of chaotic civil and national wars. Last few years I was creating in Los Angeles, a similar beautiful “melting pot” where many nationalities exist side by side, conserving their national identity and communicating peacefully with one unifying English language.
My question to the viewer in this “Alphabet” series is: Will we ever learn from history? All of the heads of our government have graduated prestigious universities where multiple history classes are taught, so why is it that they often do not learn from the history? History shows that no war has exclusively benefited any specific country or nationality. Besides losing millions of parents, siblings, and children, everything “gained” in war was eventually lost with time. Every year however, we still spend billions of tax dollars for the development of sophisticated weapons, when the weapons we already have in stock are enough to destruct the entire population of the Earth ten times over. Why do we try to control and compete with weapons development of other countries instead of leading by example, getting rid of all our weapons of mass destruction, and converting them to tools of progress and energy.
All educated individuals understand that languages, beliefs, and territories are a subject of evolution. Just as people spoke Latin before Spanish and Italian, people believed in Greek gods and pagan gods before Christianity and Islam. All aggressive empires like Roman, Mongolian, and Ottoman Empires dissolved not so long ago, just because their territories were gained with force and ideologies were pressed by force, like we force our “democracy” on Iraq & Afghanistan today.
And history will repeat itself, until we realize that there is no enemy until we make one for ourselves. Please be active and do all you can to save our fragile planet from weapons development, unnecessary wars, chaos, and from all the human errors that can still be reversed.
Just as there is not single flower more precious than another, there is no single nationality or language more deserving than another. This is what I try to convey for my audience in the “Alphabet” series. Each alphabet is intentionally painted on a large canvases in order to underline the major role of language in our lives, and emphasize that it is the main vehicle of our national identity.