Preserving the Art of the Written Word

The next day, The Tale of Davit the Lad and Khandukht the Lass was presented by the author Ararat Sarkissian and poetess Roza Hovhannisyan – the translator of the epic into Carno dialect, which is the dialect now spoken in Gyumri and Shirak region. In the course of the conversation, the artist printed images from the epic on clay boards with the help of cylinders, an old technique he has maintained and developed.

On the third day of the project a master class on calligraphy and handmade postcards was held by Gyumri painter Vahan Topchyan. Those who participated were teenagers from the Gyumri and Vanadzor branches of the National Center of Aesthetics, Art School after Merkurov, and the A3 painting group of the Gyumri branch of the Fine Arts Academy. The youngsters crafted and illustrated handmade postcards, and took the opportunity to present questions to the artist.

The “Book Ode” open-air book art fair was held on the fourth day of the project. Contemporary writers from Gyumri displayed their own books, and various souvenirs related to the book and calligraphy were presented by the handcraft specialists from Yerevan and Gyumri. To conclude the series of events, painter and graphic artist Taron Saharyan delivered a lecture on the topic, “The Evolution of Armenian Writing in the Middle Ages,” reflecting the historical and cultural process in the transformation of writing and font formation.

Recovering Memory through Art

The leit-motif of the initiative is that art can recover and preserve the identity embodied in language-culture, even though the civilizations and peoples concerned may have vanished from history, or been threatened with extinction. For artist Sarkissian this is the leading motivation for his extraordinarily creative efforts. “For me,” he has written, “the human experience, amassed during the course of thousands of years, is tremendously important.” (https://araratsarkissian.wordpress.com/). Memory, therefore, must be preserved, if identity is to survive. Certain crucial events threatening the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage had a decisive impact on him. When asked in one interview, what inspired his prints, he answered, “My main inspirations are old scripts, manuscripts and history. For example, in 2006, a whole grave of Armenian cross-stones was destroyed in Julfa. I was so sad that I couldn’t stop thinking about recreating them on paper. I sort of gave them a second life, and this is how I struggle to preserve my culture.” (https://www.homofaber.com/en/discover/discover-ararat-sarkissian) Another decisive event was the 1988 earthquake that devastated Gyumri, threatening to eradicate its identity.

To preserve this cultural testimony, Sarkissian explored and mastered techniques associated with the arts of the ancient world. For example, he learned to produce paper himself, as he explained in the same interview, from an artist he found in Jordan. Later he experimented with the technique, adding his own ingredients, like okra and Armenian herbs. He explained the importance of using such original techniques: “I firmly believe that the old techniques and traditions can be turned into something innovative. With my prints in various languages, maps, and cross-stones, I want to show that the old can be turned into new. We can’t read those scripts, but they can be an art piece to look at.”