Background

I’ve always been drawn to painting/drawing as a form of expression. It was my second favorite after dance. I was a child of USSR, which meant that through my early “indoctrination” behind “the Courtain”, I’d grown to have a certain fuzzy, warm feeling over the concept of brotherhood among all nations, brotherhood of equality, peace and shared values. All of these slogans were everywhere growing up. I’d look at them – mostly done in avangard style – from all possible windows; the windows of our apartment overlooking the cement factory behind the building block, the bus window on my way to school, the classroom window overlooking the inner fences of the school. Hence, I grew a certain appreciation of dialectic realism and geometric harmonies in paintings in galleries my parents would take me, the most impressive being the Yerevan State Art Gallery, for it later became my refuge during the holy confusing years of late 80s up to mid 90s. Every sphere of life was hit by the crash of USSR, by Armenia’s earthquake, by wars across nearly all our borders, lack of everything – electricity, gas, water, food, resulting in deep lack of values. I happened to speak fluent English, so the Gallery didn’t hesitate to take advantage of my suggestion to volunteer and become a guide to the few foreigners who’d battle the cold in the large halls of the gallery in the name of art. I remember each and every one of the 8 floors, the 1st floor hosting Armenia’s history section, the remainder of them – nearly all segments and directions of fine arts.

I was 15 at the time and used to come to work after my school day at the math-physics specialized school. The latter was a place our family’s children had to attend by tradition, so when enrolling me there, no one was least concerned whether I loved these sciences, it was good enough to mention that I was good at them, hence owed it to some invisible purpose to attend it.

So, my will would gladly escape to the gallery nearly every day. I secretly wished to become an art critic or a culturologist as our system would call it. However, this desire caused a huge debate at home, and I was instead demanded to prepare myself for the medical school (another tradition). Instead of analyzing plants and insects, I’d sit at the tutor’s kitchen table at her house and draw plants and insects without giving any verbal answers to her questions. She pitied me and told my parents she no longer would welcome me in her class for I was too mute to even get near the doors of the medical school. This sparked an even bigger dispute at home and distrustful of my love for humanitarian sciences, my parents let me know that they’ll take my idea of entering the law school or that of international relations with less anger than that of the Academy of Arts.

I never lost touch with my colleagues at the gallery and whilst attending law school, made friends from the Academy of Arts as if I were studying there. I used to go along with them to lectures on various periods of history of art and used to work as a journalist for a newspaper and a radio station. I’d continue dancing but the idea of sitting one day, undisturbed, uninterrupted, and drawing was left far behind.

Somewhere in the Middle

I found great joy studying esoteric sciences (if one may call them). This never ended. I gradually arrived to the notion of thought forms, their creation, their “programming”, their “releasing” into the public, the very essence of consciousness and its fabric. After a three hour “stay” in a state of coma in the year of 2003, these ideas entirely took over my mind. Various phenomena like deja vu, “accidental” “falls” into a parallel dimension/universe, various points in time brought me to realization that I ought to place these happenings into some form of order, I need them to make sense, for the denial of them brought me more hardship than I could have realized. This led me to signing up for a course in Moscow, offered by General Alexei Yurievich Savin and Valetina Ivanovna Sidorova.

The former had just contributed to a book with their Cold War era US counterparts. The book was titled “ESP Wars: East & West: An Account of the Military Use of Psychic Espionage as Narrated by the Key Russian and American Players”. I followed some of his lectures and writings, then went onto a course in Moscow. The program available for civilians such as me was promising to unleash any blocked/forgotten/unnoticed talents. They were various aspects in the training – energetic reading of characteristics of a person or a given situation, ability to see the reality from as many perspectives as possible and create constructs of their most likely development/continuation in nearest future. Writing excellent pieces of poetry, corresponding our energetic fields to a certain vibrational harmony of a given classical composition and drawing psychography were some of the methods we trained in. Writing poetry and psychography hit a very friendly cord with me.

The Pythagorean, Platonic, Jungian and later Russian philosophical concepts on what General Savin introduced as noosphere created a strong resonance in the experiences my mind would so frequently find itself in. Though there were no direct references done to Gurdjieff and Blavatskaya, the methodology, with which we were trained, was strongly reminiscent of the practical exercises these two (and several others) had developed, which I gladly picked up on for they were nothing new to me. During the program I indeed sensed that moment of shift in sensuality and perception. Savin did a warning on the first day, stating he’d be “harmonizing our frequencies”, to which I switched on my skeptical self. However, on all levels of what constituted my “I”, I most certainly experienced this shift more powerfully, more existentially than during any of my ten year long yoga practice sessions.

Most Recent

Psychography, accompanied with tunes of certain music (Bach, Beethoven, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Gurdjieff – De Hartmann, raw folk music, ancient Greek music), became my very being (if I may state so), a most natural extension to my mind-heart-soul coordination. I’d start drawing first thing in the morning and – grumpy about daily routine tasks one ought to do during the day – continue every moment I could pick up on till very late. This interesting process was accompanied with my sudden urge to enroll in a martial arts course. I picked kickboxing and both sides of me kept developing in a harmony of awkward synchronicity. One allowed me to understand people in their resistance to me and in my resistance towards them, analyze and appreciate each person’s energetic imprint, the other one helped me unleash some scale of dynamics in movements to the tunes of musical pieces so close to my heart/mind/soul. I went through some process of enlightenment that was nowhere near fuzzy, or postivist, or optimistic, or the usual love-everyone etc. stuff we hear in the West so much. It’s rather the opposite. I’m in a constance zone of turbulence and just as a pilot who’s trying to keep the balance and the direction of the plane in the air, my soul/essence/piece-of-collective-consciousness- that–is-me keeps my mind and body and repercussions of decisions and actions I take in some form of harmony and balance with the surrounding world.

My process begins with a Psychographic sketch. I never know where it’ll take me. Most commonly it brings me to “forgotten” deities of the ancient world or simply perceptions of surrounding reality or moment. I love travelling to what Castaneda called “places of power”, or places where time/space anomalies take place, be it for physical or non-physical reasons. I see spirits in the trees, rocks, mountains, rivers and lakes, and I’ll draw their imprint as per the soul’s perception. Some of the drawings come along with poems, on some others I mention the musical piece that inspired it. I strive to draw from “The Source”, to which we’re all connected with some silver thread.

Each piece I draw comes from the depths of all these external and internal aspects. I have been experiencing sudden astral projections into various “worlds” ever since, but with great success in terms of balance in mind and consequent actions. Drawing has become the best option of encoding certain experiences and sharing them with people of various backgrounds in various parts of the world, who’ve been writing of their impressions most positively in terms of what is it they “sensed”, “felt” when looking at them.