“Innocent” serves as a reminder that magic always surrounds us and that we must believe in our own power. It is a symbol of purity dedicated to all children of the world, dealing with war, injustice and pain.
Faerie embodies the serenity and wisdom of patience at the same time holding an innovative vision of the world. Her unique and clever sensibility makes her a master navigator, able to move swiftly with the turnings of the tide. She teaches not to judge a book by its cover, because things are not always as they seem.
One of Hagop’s “Aristocrats” paintings is a woman wearing a draping headscarf and an embroidered blouse. Her features are pretty and delicate, with small petal lips and thin brows. But this is not just a depiction of a Middle Eastern woman—a large dragonfly with its wings spread obstructs the view of most of her face. “Metaphysically, the dragonfly represents the breaking of an illusion, and the fact that it’s over her eyes [shows] the breaking of the illusion of the Middle Eastern woman.”
He wanted a moment from the final sequence of the Apartment where (spoiler alert) Jack Lemmon’s character finally expresses his love for Shirley MacClaine’s character and the only way we know how she feels about him, is by her facial expression as well as how she takes the cards from him.
This is a recent piece I did of Steve Martin from the poster for the Jerk, for an old friend. It is a perfect example of the extreme jump from one form of painting to another. On the one hand, the end goal of a detailed likeness (and doing a good job of it) to the freedom of creating shapes and using color without that particular pressure, just the joy of it AND the goal to do a good job of it (still considering the formal issues of the aesthetics of abstracts from what little I know of art history). I’m still informally a student of it.
To make the abstract (which is around 24″ x 36″), my rule of thumb is to do my best to make the colors and shapes somehow “fit” organically without giving in to the desire to make the shapes and forms “representational,” I inevitably will see things that resemble objects or familiar images. Some of those I may allow to stay in the final depending on how they work together with the rest of the piece.
