Inga & Anush - Armenian Reporter

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Union completed. Those 100,000 people
weren’t accepted as Armenians, but as
foreigners. After arriving they figured
that out, but it was too late,” he told me.
When I tried to broach the subject
one more time, gently reminding him
that the repatriates who came in the 40s
must have contributed, at the very least
through their way of life, through their
cuisine and customs, something to the
fabric of society , he said, “What good is
it when you bring people in 1946–48 and
then you exile them to Siberia in 1949
If you didn’t want these people, if you
brought them by mistake, why not just
send them back where they came from
Why do you exile them”
There was more to his anger than appeared
on the surface. He understood
what the loss of homeland meant. More
than that, he understood the hunger for
returning. For him it was about their
collective fate, their collective suffering,
the Genocide that always hung over
their heads. These feelings are portrayed
in his paintings from that time period.
With all that this artist has seen in his
life, the one thing he doesn’t have is regret.
“It was my destiny to move here, however.
I have never regretted coming. I have never
thought about leaving or living somewhere
else. I always wanted to live in my
country among my people,” he told me.
His thoughts about repatriation today
are ambiguous but of one conviction
he is sure. “Repatriation today Don’t
you think it would be better for them
to find ways of hampering people from
leaving the country” he asked. “The Diaspora
Ministry should concern itself
with finding ways of keeping people in
the country, then trying to bring back
those who left.”
Starting over in Gyumri
When the Hakobyan family repatriated
to Armenia, they were settled in Gyumri,
Armenia’s second largest city. They lived
there for five years. Hakob was 40 years
old. He was known in some artistic circles
in Armenia already because he had
donated 10 of his best paintings a few
years earlier to the National Art Gallery.
Life in Gyumri was difficult. “They
didn’t even ‘give’ me a studio to paint,” he
said. “Instead of all the accolades, if they
had allowed me to have a small room to
turn into a studio instead of working in a
corner of my tiny apartment, that would
have served me better.” He had brought
some canvas with him when he moved,
and after that was finished, he bought
what he could find, which was of very
poor quality. “A lot of my early paintings
have been ruined because of that poor
quality of canvas.” He still finds it ironic
that they would only have poor quality
canvas upon which paintings that were
sometimes worth thousands of dollars
would be painted. “Nothing made sense,”
he said, shaking his head.
“That’s how our life was in Gyumri. I
don’t want to complain that I had to
work under those conditions. For me the
most important thing was to be able to
paint in Armenia. I didn’t want to take a
break. I didn’t want people think that I
couldn’t succeed here,” he explained.
After his first solo exhibition, he slowly
began to establish himself as a painter
in the homeland. Although even art was
stifled under the Soviet regime, Hakobyan
stressed that it wasn’t always possible to
Armenian Reporter Arts & Culture February 21, 2009
suffocate every human inspiration. “Look
at Minas Avedissian. You can’t always take
the art out of the man,” he told me, referring
to a fellow artist.
What would his life’s journey been
had he not moved to Armenia “If I had
stayed in Egypt, I might have become
a different artist,” he said. The painter
was also astute. He knew never to complain
or demand in order to survive in
the system. “I had no confrontations,
but I retained my freedom in my sphere
– through my art.”
Thoughts about the nation
“I have lived half my life outside of Armenia,
then I lived under Soviet rule for
27 years and 17 years in independence,”
he said. He feels that we have suffered
as a nation because of our size. “If we
had been 30 million instead of 3 million,
do you think that the Turks could have
slaughtered us like sheep Therefore being
a small nation is a sin,” he stressed.
For Hakobyan there is an important
distinction to be made. “Independence
was given to us; we didn’t win it. For
600 years we never had independence.
Did we ever think about independence
Therefore we never wanted it and now
we don’t know what to do with it. We
still want odars to come and govern us,”
he told me. And about victories “Yes,
we won in Karabakh. But look at what
the price was – thousands dead, hundreds
of thousands of displaced people,
more than a million left the country.
If this is victory, then bravo, we won,”
he said, his voice straining. So there is
some bitterness in this man’s spirit.
And what about the state of the country
today “After 600 years of slavery and
survival, we have learned how to survive,
but in the process we have become individualistic.
We think only of taking care
of ourselves. That is why we can’t move
forward today. It’s all about the individual.
There are no unifying elements.”
He shifted in his chair and continued.
“My dear, we don’t have normal relations
with our neighbors. Two of them are our
enemies; the neighbor to the north we
want to turn into an enemy; the one
to the south is the enemy of the rest of
the world, and the other one [Russia],
with whom we have no natural borders
and who is our former ‘owner,’ is in our
country protecting our borders.”
His disenchantment causes waves of
sadness to rush over him. He is frustrated
because he is the first to admit that
we are a nation of gifted people. “The Armenian
has limitless abilities. Before the
Soviets, the Armenian was another sort
of person, a totally different person,” he
said. “We had genius; we had the farmer,
but they turned him into a kolkhoznik;
we had the artisan but they turned him
into a laborer; and the entrepreneur was
sentenced to exile or death. That is what
the Soviet regime bequeathed us.”
Studio visit
Finding that our conversation had exhausted
him, I suggested we move to his
studio to look at his new creations. His
demeanor changed, and the sadness and
frustration subsided as he stepped into
his oasis.
As he walked around his studio, he
told me that he works every day for a
few hours. Today he produces about
20–25 pieces annually. “I don’t have the
same enthusiasm as I did, but creating
something new still exists in me,” he
said, pointing to shelves of newly created
metal sculptures.
Over the past year, Hakobyan has
started creating sculptures out of scrap
metal parts. “Every weekend I go to the
Vernissage and buy these metal parts. After
creating the sculpture I incorporate
in into my paintings. I have made about
Left: A collection of
Hakobyan’s metal
sculptures. Below: The
story of Aryuts Mher
is depicted in this stillto-be-named
painting.
100 sculptures this past year,” he said.
A sculpture that appears to be two
fish suspended on metal rods, proves,
on closer inspection, to be two pincers
used in jewelery making. “You are seeing
this for the first time. I haven’t shown
them yet,” he smiled. I feel privileged as
I walk around the room, looking at the
sculptures. When I asked him where he
got the idea to create sculptures out of
old metal parts, he said, “I don’t know.
It just came to me.” Even at 87 years
of age, this august painter still has fervent
inspiration and creative drive. His
paintings are still evolving. He has begun
introducing not only his sculptures
to his canvas, but also mannequins and
gloves. If everything goes according to
his plans, he intends to have an exhibition
in April in Yerevan. He stops for a
moment and then smiles: “It’s like an interesting
game. When I put these metal
pieces together, I feel as though I’ve become
a child once again.” Perhaps this is
the best time in Hakob Hakobyan’s life
as he tries to recapture his lost childhood
with new creations in an unfamiliar
time.
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