Hratch Israelian - Armenia
About the artist
Member since the very beginning
This painting technique is a replica of technologies developed by the Industrial Revolution. Why Industrial Revolution? Because the new shapes and surfaces that came out of the Industrial Revolution have composed the cultural landscape of the 20th century.
If we want to see the fingerprints of 20th century culture, we have this painting technique for it.
Technological transformations at the beginning of the 20th century sparked the spirit of "modernity". While the modern painting exploring ways to align itself with the dynamics of the time, the painting process remained technically unexplored throughout the century.
We have to go back 600 years to find the last technical innovation in the history of painting. 600 years ago, in the absence of camera and electronic communication painting was an advance technique. "It was the main generator of social symbols". Painting brought the world to people and showed how to live in it, new values to adopt and ideas to believe.
Today all that is successfully achieved by mass media, simply because it's armed with more advance technologies. Cameras and computers are the main technical tools of mass media. the current power of these tools evolved through 160 years developments, This remarkable developments attracted universal efforts and resources, because of their practical functions and not the artistic ones. But parallel to their practical use, cameras and computers created numerous masterpices of art.
Guided by these same economic and aesthetic principals can we reinvent the painting process? If yes, how to use our hands and the same paint to compete with magical technologies of our time? Let's say we succeed, can painting regain its old power by this?
This painting technique showing us, that a humble, hand-controlled process with the same paint is enough to provide great production speed, extremely low cost, unlimited size and high quality that cameras and computers have not yet achieved in their ultimate visual images.
Hratch Israelian born in Armenia, in 1956.
He pioneered this painting technique in 1972.
Since 1980 Hratch lives and works in Los Angeles county.
