Vahrad Melikjanian

Howdy! You see, you think you know everything about your life, but when you have to actually write about it, your brain just shuts off.
Well, here I how everything began.
My “rendering” started in 1994. I grew up in a tiny town Vanadzor (or as I call it Crapland) among abandoned half ruined buildings, in bandit ruling, ghetto resembling post-soviet environment. So, this is perhaps the reason why have an impression that here in Armenia everything, and I mean everything is half-done.
My dad loved motorcycles and we had a workshop garage in our backyard. It was my favorite place, where I could endlessly mess up everything and nobody would scold me for that.
I was curious to see how my father was doing arc welding or fixing some motorcycle parts. In general, like all children, I was interested in everything.
My mom is a teacher. She used to read a lot of fairy tales to me. I really loved the tales of Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Anderson. While my mom was reading, I was visualizing all sorts of worlds in my head. I could listen to the same fairy tale over and over again. I have always loved creating something. I was obsessed with weapons, and exploding things. First I was simply fond of them, then I started making them. ...

I left the study of painting at Armenian Pedagogical University in Vanadzor. The whole my knowledge I have got only from my experience of painting.

I have had many exhibitions, but the most important and memorable ones were in Goumri and Vanadzor. As an artist I participated in the "Fine Arts Museum" in Vanadzor the topic of which was war. It was vitally important to me to participate there because the impact of wars is disastrous, as it badly affects people's life. I want to help people to make their life better, to give them a lot of positive feelings through my art pieces. Moreover, I participated in the exhibition in the "Style Graphic Museum" in Goumri, which was very memorable for me because it was the first time I exhibit my sculptures made of iron pieces. That is kind of a new thing for me because my sculptures are made mainly from iron waste. I think that is a good idea to recycle iron waste because we need to keep our environment clean. The exhibition was the simple one, but on the other hand, it was very important for me, because of the idea of my sculptures. I participated just to change people's opinion about art-making ways, the awards did not interest me anymore: "Art is everywhere, you should notice it".