Eliza Drawing

Satenik Ghulijanyan was born in 1985 in Armenia. She was first introduced to art at the age of 6 by her father who was also her first teacher. She studied cloth design in university in Yerevan. In parallel she took private lessons in painting and sculpture. In 2012 she moved together with her family to France and a year later to Germany. Frequent moves, cultural differences, the necessity to understand and embrace new cultures have all influenced Satenik’s artwork and choice of themes. Two other major influences were Nagorno-Karabakh war in 1992-94, which she witnessed in the region bordering frontline, and the lack of appreciation as a female painter and sculptor in professional circles comprised mostly of male artists. Satenik prefers to paint with oil and model with clay but works also with pleasure with watercolor, pastel, charcoal. She uses free brushstrokes, daring colours, thick oil layers and volumes. The focus of Satenik’s artwork is human love, passion, loneliness, worries or phobias and philosophy, as well as Nature, its immensity and intrinsic relation with us. Her artwork includes portrays and compositions as well as landscape and still life. The greatest influences on Satenik’s style have had impressionists, expressionists, individual painters and sculptors such as Emil Nolde, Francis Bacon, Auguste Rodin. Also her father and her sculpture teacher, who believed in her and supported her professional development with great efforts, have had an immediate influence on the formation of her style.