Composition Painting

Ashot Khachatrian was born in 1954 in the Biblical valley of the Ararat mountain in Armenia. The history and ancient traditions of the Armenian people are source of his inspiration. Since 1977 the artist has been living in St. Petersburg. During 1978 - 1981 he took seminars at the Repin's Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture of the Academy of Arts. The first group exhibition, in which he participated in 1982, was a success for Ashot. The cultural and creative atmosphere of St. Petersburg contributed to his formation as an artist. Ashot Khachatrian's paintings have a powerful emotional appeal. They are characterized by richness, generosity and bright colors of his technique. The artist possesses talent of elevating above events of every day life, of looking at the world from the point of eternal values. In his works Ashot is lead by his highly developed intuition, helping him reach harmony in the world outlook Being endowed with rich inheritance of the Armenian art school, he is far from limited by its traditions. Some art critics consider his paintings as a peculiar and original development of the French art on the verge of the two epochs. The artist deals with different genres - figurative paintings, still lifes, landscapes and portraits. His paintings are made in a large and free technique. Ashot's compositions, indifferent of their size, are monumental as to their conceptions and are endowed with both powerful temperament and deep content. Some of his works are made by combining shifted and overlaid spaces, thus expressing several themes in one and the same composition. His works create a synthetic image of the present and future by combining space and time, being inspired by the architectural monuments of his native country. Any narrative beginning is lacking in his paintings. The theme is always expressed by exclusively pictorial means. Ashot's still life is imbued with his delight in the beauty of the world around him and the variety of forms it takes. His richer, more colorful paintings have taken the place of these bright strokes of pure color, conveying the texture of bananas, peaches and pomegranates, but have retained the same decorativeness as their first principle. This artist's paintings meet one of today's main demands on art - to communicate one's own view of the world, leaving behind something understated that stimulates imagination.
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