Untitled Document

Armand Tatossian's diploma work for the Royal Canadian Academy into which he was accepted the youngest member ever - in 1973. The painting of Montebello, Quebec, radiates with hold offbeat shades that resonate in the scene of brilliant light, landscape and architecture. Tatossian achieved his effect by a heavily brushed application of paint and something touching in his enigmatic strongly rendered drama of light and shade. Everything is animated by a visual and physical fragmentation of the surface that is both riveting and prophetic of the work Tatossian would create later, including the attention he pays to indicating the way into the space at the lower left of the painting. Of special importance is the prominence of drawing and composition in the work. The trees frame the distant view, but in the distance the sky adds a feeling of openness. The medium- impetuously handled paint- creates an effect by playfully using Van Gogh's post-Impressionist vocabulary, but takes Van Gogh"s expressive handling one step further, that the brushwork is even larger and seemingly more spontaneous. Tatossian believes in color as an emotional carrier of meaning, almost independent of form and composition, like Van Gogh, he accepts the artificiality of the picture; he is committed to a portable easel picture. The painting, as the highest mode of artistic achievement and communication. One piece is an environmental work with eight painting-parts: New York Yellow Cabs starting to move and ending up in a whirl of movement and light.

Who is Armand Tatossian ? Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1948 . He's an artist since 1965, Professor of Art at Loyola College in Montreal and Concordia University. - has been engaged in a systematic scene recording sight that he sees, especially in Montreal. He's an artist who is painting from life and he doesn't go far from his studio in old Montreal. I go any place with green stuff he says." I don't go far. I carry the painting home wet in my big van."

When I meet Tatossian, he tries to explain his art, talking in a soft voice with a slight Armenia accent. He reminds me of one of the hobbit characters from the LORD OF THE RING, a comfort-loving person, who surprises even himself by his resourcefulness and skill as a painter." You are born with a technique and it develops with time," he says. Drawing is important. I am drawing all the time, with the brush."

The first thing you encounter in Tatossian's work is their color. He is an artist who's palette does not include black. The result in his work is a permanent brilliance, a clarity and almost fierce joyousness in the light and color of the scene before him. Tatossian's art is not really about the formal evocation of landscape in world mode and everything to do with his own encounter with the scene. He's a poet of the world before him. Looking into his studies with its piles piles of drawing, the open boxes of pastels, the hundreds of brushes stored in old boxes, the paint encrusted easel and storage unit, you feel tantalized by what is occurring here-- that a painter who cares about his craft. His art is about inner worlds and feelings and it veers from exuberance to exuberance.

I have not recently met a painter so concerned with the craft of art, with preparing the canvas and beginning with a charcoal drawing- or using the color raw sienna to begin to paint directly on the surface.

This was the way artists made art in the nineteenth century, a world to witch Tatossian is connected through his family, a long line of artists from the time of his grandfather, for whom he was named, who was a painter and curator of the Alexandria Museum of Egypt, to his grandfather's brother, the Armenian landscape painter Yeghiche Tatossian, who traveled to Paris and became a Post-Impressionist ( only to return to Armenia and bring the style home), to his father, Charles Tatossian, who is still a painter in Canada. Tatossian was introduced to art studies at the age of six or seven by his grandfather who took him to a beach with a sketch pad. Slowly, assisted by this understanding man, the boy started to draw.

Tatossian's early teachers in Canada also believed in the power and meaning of draftsmanship. He studied first with the Serbian Sculptor Jose Majzner, then with the respected portraitist and muralist, Adam Sherriff-Scott. Tatossian met Sherriff-Scott in a strange way.

Having won first prize at a painting exhibition at the Arts Club of Montreal, he adored a portrait by Sherriff-scott in a show, thus indirectly, he feels, choosing the artist as a teacher, when he met Sherriff-Scott, whose work was in much demand, Sherriff-Scott told him that he needed an assistant. The older man wanted an artist who would help him restore murals he has done at an earlier date, but told Tatossian, "I'm not going to pay you. I'll teach you instead.

Tatossian still admires Sherriff-Scott and remembers him with affection. After his training, in 1969, he shared Sherriff-Scott's studio as his assistant. He remembers the congenial atmosphere in the arts in those days, the way Sherriff-Scott, who lived at Montreal, would decide to go sketching. "You drive," he would tell Tatossian, and they would stop to pick up Goodridge Roberts on the way. In the neighborhood lived other artist such as Stanley Cosgrove and Jack Beder. A. Y. Jackson and his niece Naomi Jackson Groves often dropped in. Tatossian remembers Stanley Borenstein, the exciting expressionist painter, who sat in on Sherriff-scott's last classes. "He was one hundred percent ahead of is time " recalls " Tatossian.

Sherriff-scott, who had studied at the Edinburgh school of Art from 1904 to 1906 (he had been born in Perth, Scotland), was strict with Tatossian, making him study John Ruskin's The Elements of Drawing, a classic text, and insisting on careful drawing, nothing slap-dash. Sherriff-Scott owned and admired a quick sketch by Marc-Aurele de Foy Suzor-Cote, the Canadian Impressionist painter.

He showed the little he owned to Tatossian as an example. Do a quick sketch first, Sherriff-Scott said, then follow it up with more detailed work in pencil or charcoal. Sherriff-Scott stressed that the artist can be a good craftsman with fine individual study of detail and good color, but lack atmosphere. He spoke of color, how color works in dark-room and the nature of color itself, from violet to red. He did not believe there was such a thing as black in nature and in Canada, saw the tremendous clarity of light: "never turn to black," he said and "never absolutely pure white." White can be a glaze after, you can take your white and give it a little glaze of transparent burnt sienna or raw sienna… it warms it and makes it a cream." Sherriff-Scott was a craftsperson who believed in using tone rather than pitching up the color. He was a source of knowledge. Painting is a drawing with color added, he said." Beauty is that which the eye sees with the greatest ease."

The primary purpose of painting is to give pleasure, to uplift the spirit of the onlooker, to receive as it were from the picture the same sensitivity of feeling, mood, and tempo which the artist put into it." In his own work, Sherriff-Scott exhibited an extremely wide range, from landscapes to marines, interiors, flower subjects, still-life and murals.

It was the latter with which Sherriff-Scott needed help. He had originally painted such works in the 1920s. Now in his eighties, he felt that an assistant was needed. Tatossian was that man.

In 1970, Tatossian want to Paris to study. There he met the famous French painter and lithographer (Jean) CARZOU (originally Karning Zumulian and his uncle). CARZOU introduced him to the naive painter Bernard Buffet. In Paris, Tatossian also met the painter Jansem (Jani Semerdjian). But a spell at the Academy des Beaux-Arts did not last long. Tatossian went on to Bergamo in Italy to learn mural techniques at Carrarra Academy. Here he learned the basics of art, the very ones that have stood him in good stead today.

Tatossian was brought up in the world of art, studied abroad, but he thinks his art is quite personal- in answer to the question of what he would call his work, "myself," he says. and there's something else as well. He recalls that he was working in pastel, ( fairly tightly and academically) in his early work, when he traveled to the island of Rhodes in Greece in 1973.

This lovely island in the Dodecanese is a paradise for tourists in the eastern Mediterranean because of its balmy climate. One of its enchantments is its strong light, which plays upon its white houses to make stark contrasts of light and dark. Tatossian remembers the trip as a key in his development because of the extraordinary light: it was harsh and the colors brilliant. He recalls seeing a "bright, bright blue." He thought he was hallucinating. "It's kitchy," he said to himself, "but I want to paint it."

The works he painted on this trip helped him in his work. He painted the acropolis , street corners with flowers and stairs-- the flowers blazing with color in a scene of yellow, cream and blue, a white church, a stairway in light, the village white on white. Color in such strong light has a way of glinting or gleaming dully in small areas.

On his return to Montreal, he was able to continue his decisive handling, and thought the light in Canada is often duller, he could sometimes see the brilliant contrast he had seen in Greece caused by light in Canada, even in familiar places, places such as Montebello, where he painted his Royal Canadian Academy Diploma Piece. The trip to Greece meant a change in his work towards more decisive use of paint, a firmer decision to explore color, even to the point of handling form abstractly. " I take nature and change it my way," Tatossian says. It was after this trip and well into the body of his new work, that he went painting with one of Canada's most famous abstract painter, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and Riopelle purchased two of Tatossian's painting . " Take off those trees and you have a good Riopelle here," Riopelle said of Tatossian's work.

Tatossian's work to date reflects the choice he made in 1973 to deal with nature with more decision and more color. It's not difficult to see what he's getting at. It's not the artwork that matters, but the way it records the light and the way light affects the color. The viewer becomes a participant in a scene of nature, with fluffy clouds and a spacious day, or of dull rooftops in the city. He has always enjoyed studying cities from unusual views, from windows above the city, or in the harbor The way into the composition concerns him; it helps indicate the depth of the scene before him .

Some of Tatossian building in the distance, for instance are abstract, but that is the way we may see distance. Abstraction for Tatossian reflects reality; it helps him explore color and light. He is an artist whose work looks as though you can understand immediately what he is saying, that nature, life, refreshes us, Riopelle said to Tatossian once," Whenever I get depressed, I go to Giverny." Giverny, the home of Monet and the place of his famous garden, is a tranquil spot, full of flowers and happy beauty. Tatossian too is telling us that with hid work everything will be fine. If we're depressed, we can go to Tatossian, to paraphrase Riopelle.

Tatossian most recent work is about one of the great cities of history: New York, and in it he reveals a city that has changes for ever. His passion for the place before him comes through in his paintings: from Times Square to the Empire State Building. Most of all, he notices the Taxis, the way they move, and interaction among people lying in little groups in Central Park in the City. When he paints the Twin Towers, by memory, he uses the shapes of the Towers like a shadow.

' YOU ALWAYS BE IN MY MIND, ' he titles the work.

Some of his subjects are abstracted in part- he represent ,Ground Zero, in and abstraction where a tree grow in a middle of dust , he title it.

"FROM DUST TO LIVE"

Text by : Joan Murray

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