Anush G Babayan
ANUSH G. BABAYAN: PhD, associate professor of the Russian-Armenian University (RAU), member of the Union of Artists of Armenia and the International Union of Artists of Estonia, born in Yerevan, Armenia.
She teaches original subjects: «Axiology of art», «Aesthetic communication», «Creative art therapy». In teaching, she uses technologies that integrate methods of scientific thinking and methods of aesthetic development of existence based on a synthesis of the arts (poetry, painting, music) and scientific theories.
Since August 2012, at the age of 58, she picked up a Chinese brush for the first time and started painting, but over time she developed a specific and easily recognizable style of her own, unique to her work.From 2013 to 2024 organized and participated in international exhibitions in Armenia, Belarus, USA
Her painting "Poet's Soul" is printed on the front page of the April 2024 issue of the American Art Journal "Art& Beyond";
Became a winner at the West Hollywood Art Festival, as evidenced by the reviews of famous American art critics and a certificate from the Mayor of Hollywood and the Art Commission recognizing the absolute uniqueness of Anush G Babayan's style and technique.
Many psychotherapists note that Anush Babayan’s paintings carry a message of healing. They have a strong therapeutic effect on the viewer. Like visual prayers, meditations Anush's paintings help the viewer to connect his microcosm with the Macrocosm and then balance and harmony appears within.
How has your personal and philosophical understanding of time influenced the thematic choices and creative processes in your artwork? Could you discuss any particular piece where time played a central role in its conception and reception?
Thank you for the question! Very challenging and interesting at the same time. I will not hide, I have been thinking about it for a long time and not only after your question. I would like to say in the words of Augustine Aurelius: ‘I know perfectly well what time is, as long as I do not think about it, but when I think about it, I do not know what time is’. I would add to this that there are doubts whether time exists at all?
In my understanding Time is some special, continuous, comprehensive process of movement in Space that leads to changes. It is a process of change of state that occurs in our senses. And our senses are the measuring instruments of our body. Over the years we feel time more accurately, but there are times when we do not feel it at all. For example, in periods of fascination, and it doesn't matter what: creativity, some business, a person, a natural phenomenon, listening to music, watching TV programmes, a match, etc.. In other words, we forget about everything in the world when our attention, motivation and situation are combined in one energy flow, and then conditions for productive harmony are created. And then Time seems to stop, at least for someone who feels a state of complete detachment, there is a sense of a moment that one would like to stop!
Of course, I can tell you about the creation of a particular painting where meditations on the form and essence of things pushed me to understand Time. This is a series of paintings ‘Space. Time. Space’, where I want to convey a multi-sounding silence, where there are wordless clues. In the painting ‘Ancestral Hints’ the basis is a bronze artefact of the IV - III millennium found in Armenia, called ‘Model of the Universe’. If you look into the painting, you can see the image of the face of the ‘ancestor’ who gives clues to understand the old in a new way. They transmit to us through various channels (in this case, the artefact) the systemic knowledge of the Universe, leading us, modern people, to the infinite space of Galaxies, where there are other worlds, other galaxies, other planets, stars and other life, different from our earthly life. In happy moments of creativity often the river of Time takes me to the depths of ages and I get a lot of knowledge from my feelings. I call them feeling-knowledge. I believe that Time, in its movement towards change, shows that form helps us to gain experience in order to enrich our essence, which is indestructible because it contains the seed of energy.
Considering your extensive expertise in aesthetic education, what innovative strategies would you propose for integrating aesthetic education into modern educational curriculums? What do you perceive as the long-term benefits of such integration for students navigating the complexities of the 21st century?
You are right, I have long been engaged in axiological problems of aesthetic education of young people. My direct scientific interests include the development of innovative strategies for the integration of aesthetic education into modern educational programmes, I will name the main specially developed courses ‘Axiology of Art’, ‘Aesthetic Communication’, ‘Self-discovery Workshops. Development of personal creativity’. The programmes of these courses represent a certain integrated integrity united by a common idea - the idea of cultivating beauty as a universal spiritual experience expressed in art, everyday life and nature. They focus on the perception of aesthetic value, on the elements of dialogical perception of artistic works, aesthetic competence. Our aim is to provide the latest research in the field of aesthetics and to present a subject area for the development of students' practical skills. Therefore, we consider humanistic problems from various positions on the basis of the achievements of cultural history in the context of world outlook (ethical, aesthetic, moral, religious, etc.) searches of the individual. Our model of aesthetic education includes six integrated stages:
1. theoretical understanding of the basics of aesthetics as an axiology of art, allowing to lay the foundation of special skills for assessing aesthetic value.
2. Examples of the instructor's own creative expression, providing students with the opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of using accumulated knowledge in the experience of communicating art - aesthetic communication.
3. steps: I-observe and reflect; II-facts and your opinion; III-situation and your actions related to the implementation of dialogue skills.
4. Practical use of skills and abilities of perception, interpretation, evaluation of aesthetic value in the process of creative self-expression at the Self-Discovery Workshops.
5. Reflexion. Self-evaluation, during which communication participants can formulate specific goals that will help them to master key skills more effectively.
6. Review.
The expected result is the formation of students' aesthetic value orientations. Their focus on recognising, comprehending, evaluating and choosing value from possible options, types, means and goals of action.
In my opinion, it would be incorrect to talk about the long-term advantages of anything in our rapidly changing world. Especially if we take into account the complexities of the 21st century, when the new world dictates its own images, its own conditions of perception and attitudes. We all, including young people, often find ourselves at a loss because we do not have time to respond to the challenges of the time. Such a phenomenon as ‘failure to keep up’ has appeared. This is how the disconnection increases, deepening this discord over time.
Of course, the question arises: Can aesthetic attitudes and moral criteria, taking into account the current socio-historical context, provide a strategy of personal behaviour to set higher goals?
Based on my long experience, I can say, yes, but partially! In our case, we are talking about creating conditions for the formation of stable aesthetic needs and the development of selective-evaluation activity in the educational process; further on, the stable needs will motivate the activity and, to some extent, the behaviour of the individual. After all, today the super task of education and upbringing is to form such a personality, which could conduct a dialogue with many cultures, different types of consciousnesses, logics, levels of outlook, aesthetic and ethical points of view. All this requires from a person the skills of communication and understanding of the ‘other’, therefore, a person who possesses the skills of looking and seeing, listening and hearing, reading and understanding, contemplating and reflecting will always find value meaning in the process of making choices in life activity. Our technologies develop these very skills and abilities.
Your artwork is often credited with possessing profound therapeutic qualities. Could you elaborate on the specific artistic elements and techniques you employ to infuse your art with such healing properties? How do you measure or observe the impact of these properties on your audience?
First of all, I would like to say that creativity breeds creativity!
The most important element that gives my creativity healing properties is selfless Love for all living and non-living things: every blade of grass, drop of water, pebble, flower, bush, tree, bird, man, earth.... All my paintings are a prayer for Love, because ‘everything is in me and I am in everything’.
Before starting to paint a picture, I need to find a state of spiritual peace and tranquility, which is the main condition for concentration. Before starting the work I read in Armenian healing prayers from the ‘Book of Lamentations’ by Grigor Narekatsi - Armenian poet, philosopher and theologian, saint of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Catholic Church, representative of the early Armenian Renaissance (10th century). The Catholic Church recognised him as one of the thirty-six ‘Teachers of the Church’. The recognition of Narekatsi as doctor ecclesiae is a unique inter-church event, especially since he ‘was not in communion with the Catholic Church’.
I did not set out to create a technique, but it developed from the unity of painting and writing based on the ‘one trait’ technique of Chinese Gohua painting (‘trace’ or ‘medium’ of the inner spiritual depth of the artist's experience) in synthesis with Armenian colouring and modern tendencies of using different technical means.
I work exclusively on rice paper, using Chinese brushes and mineral colours. Such work requires exceptional precision, as corrections are inadmissible in paintings of this style. This is not difficult for me because the same conditions apply to teaching: The word spoken is chosen very carefully, as it has a very powerful energy. Here, too, corrections are not permissible.
When I paint pictures, they are ‘portraits’ of my impressions, which remain in the storehouses of my emotions, and when they show mountains, birds, trees, people, angels, etc., they are portraits of my impressions, i.e. of everything that is in me. Therefore my Ararat, my apricot branch, my stork, my tree, my flower are all living beings, because they are in me, so they think, feel, move as I do, i.e. they live together with me..... My paintings are my thought-feelings, where my feeling-knowledge manifests itself as on photographic paper.
And there is also a certain understatement in all my paintings, indicating a continuation in time and space.....
How do I measure the impact on the viewers? They tell me about it themselves. Many people write poetry under the influence of my paintings, musicians easily interpret this or that theme, some people get in a better mood, others concentrate on their inner world, and psychotherapists have found that prolonged contemplation of my paintings relieves pain, curbs depression and promotes word creation. It is important for me that the viewer receives positive energy - the energy of Goodness, Joy and Love. This is what can heal a person's inner wounds.
You have pioneered an educational approach that amalgamates poetry, painting, and music. Could you recount a specific instance or educational scenario where this multidisciplinary approach dramatically transformed the aesthetic or personal development of your students?
Without false modesty I can say, yes! They begin to look at the world in a different way. I developed the model on the basis of the idea of synthesis of arts, relying on the possibilities of humanitarian and artistic-aesthetic cognition. Firstly, the dialogue between the arts - poetry, music and painting, their interaction and intertwining in artistic culture is explained by their special possibilities of penetrating into the spiritual world of a person, which has three main spheres - thoughts, feelings and perceptions, and the subject activity of a person is expressed in three ways of comprehension of objects by the subject - in their cognition, value comprehension and transformation. And these activities are provided by the corresponding mental processes: thinking provides cognitive activity, experience - value-orientation, imagination - transformative practice. Various kinds of art, striving to embody these aspects of spiritual life, develop adequate means. The word conveys the work of thought, music reflects experience through the intonational palette, and painting adequately conveys human perceptions in the form that the real sensual perception of reality gives them. The versatile and deep penetration of sound, word, and colour into the consciousness of a person activates the mechanism of comparison and identification, thus contributing to the process of reflection, self-evaluation, i.e. self-knowledge.
Secondly, a person (his deeds, inner world, his creations), being the object of research, appears before the cognising person as a set of texts, which constitute the objective side of cognition. And the perception, interpretation and evaluation of aesthetic values of literature, music, painting in interrelation allow the recipient to see the infinite variety of individualities and at the same time form an idea of man as a whole, as a ‘text’. Thus, the synthesis of arts, revealing unknown aspects, reflected in a complex way in the artistic image, gives the recipient the opportunity to ‘experience the unlived’, modelling the conditions of formation and development of personality, introducing it to universal values.
Having embarked on your painting career at a later stage in life, how has this journey altered or reinforced your perceptions of human creativity and its potential for growth irrespective of age? Can you discuss how this personal evolution has mirrored or influenced changes in your artistic style?
In response, let me correct your question. We were in the diplomatic service, not travelling, that is, we lived and worked.
I have always endeavoured to go through life renewing myself, I do not think that a person after 50 or 60 years of age is no longer able to create new things. Perhaps, to be a good mathematician, one should start early, but for art - on the contrary, the more accumulated life-artistic experience, the deeper the artist will reveal the problem. And if a person has something to say, he will definitely find a way to express himself. I wanted to show by my own example, first of all to my daughter and granddaughter, and then to my numerous students, that the main wisdom lies in man himself, the sooner he knows himself, the better he will understand ‘others’ and the world as well.
In what ways do you consciously incorporate and reflect universal human values within your artworks? How do you believe art can serve as a conduit for understanding and reconciliation among diverse cultural and personal backgrounds?
Certainly, it is art that can serve as a guide for understanding and reconciliation between representatives of different cultures and personalities, because the language of art is universal. In everyday life a person constantly has to make a choice, for this he has to observe various phenomena, facts, events, and in order to evaluate, he has to establish a value sense. And here man cannot do without reflection, in which he again has to evaluate, that is, in all actions, whether it is perception, interpretation of facts or events, impression or emotion, comparison of opinions about phenomena or events, it does not matter, there is evaluation. Recognising, defining the essence of a fact, an individual makes an opinion, considering the given fact from different angles, comprehending the situation, he chooses actions. As we see, any human activity: everyday, scientific, domestic or aesthetic-artistic is connected with evaluation. And this evaluation is formed on the basis of interests and feelings, preferences and knowledge, tastes and ideals, moral criteria and aesthetic attitudes of each individual. And to answer three simple questions: What? How? For what? sometimes it is necessary to use the whole complex of basic values of culture, the whole arsenal of evaluation criteria, ethical norms, traditions, aesthetic attitudes, i.e. the whole sphere of values of culture. In order to speak to the whole world, it is not necessary to know many languages, it is enough to know the language of your own heart.
My creative work helps everyone to ask questions and find the way to their heart. This is evidenced by the numerous poems of contemporary Armenian poets and my students, which took place at the Self-Discovery Workshops. I have video materials, but they are too voluminous to forward.
Given the dual emphasis on scientific methodologies and artistic creativity in your teaching, how do you maintain a balance between these seemingly contrasting domains? What challenges have you encountered, and how have they shaped your teaching philosophy?
They are contrasting, but they are united by one common property - passion, aspiration, based on Love, responsibility, creativity.
Sometimes it is difficult to maintain the balance, but for me life is creativity, science, art, all parts of my creative labour. After all, a person always strives for wholeness, filling all patterns of his nature.
What key messages or philosophies do you hope your students and the viewers of your art carry forward? Looking toward the future, how do you wish to be remembered and what impact do you aim to leave on the art community and beyond?
The main idea is reverence for life, a sense of the joy of being, a caring and careful attitude to everything. I have a series of paintings called ‘The Tree of Inner Life’. The idea is based on the simple truth, ‘what is inside is also outside’. Each of us during our life grows (or not) at least one tree in reality and ‘tree’ inside ourselves: planting, watering, nourishing, cutting branches, in a word, caring. It is clear that it depends on the ‘gardener’ how it will grow - high or low, healthy or sick, beautiful or ugly... The level of knowledge, feelings, emotions, volitional qualities will also determine the growing conditions of this ‘tree’ of inner life. In the inner world of a person there are also different paths, roads. So, figuratively speaking, my concept is that spiritual values fulfil the role of syntactic signs (dot, comma, question mark, exclamation mark), regulating the movement of personality along the inner trajectory. This role is played by universal values, such absolutes as freedom, life, the search for truth, justice, goodness, beauty, which act as ‘punctuation of the will’ (Nietzsche) of Man. Making a choice between good and evil, light and darkness, beautiful and ugly, proper and existent, moral and immoral, man always relies on the values of his own culture, but the values of another culture can also be appropriated by him, because the world of values is changeable, and having the foundation of universal values, he will always find the right reference points.
In my paintings I always try to bring people the Light of spiritual life, peace that comes to a person as a result of prayers, meditations, free labour. My super task is to preserve the human in man, not to lose the connection of times, generations, peoples...My dream is to create and to bring people the light of God in art. To be in harmony with myself and others. To rejoice in life and to please others.
It is a bold proposal - to look into the future! Certainly, I want to leave a mark with my new vision, planetary consciousness and to influence the artistic community with my technique and style of writing, to go beyond it to develop synthesis in culture. I really want the healing energetic grain of essence in my art to develop and for as many people as possible to be healed through my paintings.
Could you elaborate on how Armenian and Estonian artistic traditions have woven into and influenced your artistic expression and pedagogical techniques? Are there specific elements from these traditions that resonate deeply within your own style?
I would like now to dwell more on my creative work and tell you how and for what purpose I began to paint pictures.
My specific style and manner of painting are purely individual. My painting is a kind of visual expression of my world outlook, philosophical reflections on the meaning of existence, reverence for the ancient experience of my people and the ever-renewing nature. There is no name for this style yet, but we can conditionally call it ‘Magical Impressionism’, as elements of energetic attraction - some magic and fixation of a momentary impression ‘here and now’, are present in all the paintings.
The world outlook concept of my style is based on the synthesis of cultures: Armenian, Russian, Western and Far Eastern - Chinese. The most important component is the philosophical and ideological basis of the Armenian alphabet as a code of reason and a code of Christian worldview. The second element is futuristic abstractionism and symbolism in Russian poetry of the early twentieth century, the third is Western romanticism; and the fourth is the ideal of enlightened emptiness of Chinese Taoism. In other words, a certain inner hidden continuum of consciousness is created, where thoughts and feelings are transformed into knowledge, and where things are transformed: the implicit becomes explicit, the ordinary turns into the extraordinary, the big seems small, the small acquires the outlines of grandiose dimensions, etc. However, it is important for me not to limit myself to aesthetic tasks, but to make the viewer participate in the endless self-discovery and self-transformation in the process of contemplation.
The subject of my aesthetic vision is the symbolic vertical of the above-ground and the horizontal of the experience of comprehending, recognising the microcosm through the perception of the macrocosm. This is the essential task of developing inner vision. By using panoramic vision and screening, which are the means of Chinese painting, I try to encourage the viewer to ‘enter’ the spiritual world of the author, and through this to ‘find’ the way to himself, to his inner world.
As you look to the future, are there particular themes or artistic methodologies that you are keen to explore? How do you anticipate your artistic style will evolve over the next decade, and are there any upcoming projects that exemplify this evolution?
I have grandiose projects, but I need equally grandiose funds to implement them. I think it’s a thankless task to guess what will happen next... we’ll meet in five or ten years, and I’ll tell you what innovative ideas and grandiose projects of mine have already come true.
Thank you for your attention, Anush G Babayan