Page 46 - Studio International - April 1965

Varujan Boghosian Portrait of the artist as litterateur

by Dore Ashton

Oranges and lemons are traditionally two distinct tions. He has an arachnoid imagination : To collate his
things, but Varujan Boghosian would find a way to ideas and fancies, he works on an expansive web,
equate them. Boghosian stubbornly defies the shib- reticulating, relating, constructing and pulling together.
boleths of modern art, insisting on his right to be an This mind that associates backwards and forward in
outright illustrator of the vast world of analogies. time can make abstractions concrete and the concrete
His method, in his haunting constructions, is the evanescent. As an example, 'weather' for Boghosian
method of a poet. This lean, vivid American of Turkish- has a concrete, noun-like connotation. In certain of his
Armenian descent, seems driven by a divine afflatus mellowed wood constructions, he explains that the
which never subsides. At 38, his finely-drawn Middle 'colour is done by weather'. Not just random
Eastern face with large, restless eyes, is ever animate weather: he chooses his 'weather' like a painter
with thoughts that seem to shuttle back and forth chooses colour. 'I have a piece out on the jetty in
without surcease. 'I am absolutely not afraid to be Provincetown waiting', he confides. 'It is already done
called an illustrator', he says firmly. 'In my construc- in my mind'. Meanwhile, weather is working for him.
tions I always have a definite end in mind, and the Boghosian's constructions of the past few years are
literary content is very important'. exclusively drawn from the Orpheus myth—a myth
Not only is literary content important to Boghosian, which he reads with infinite variations. For him, as for
The Golden Measure 1964 but the poetic principle of association is his chief imple- such modern artists as Noguchi and Ingmar Bergmann,
35 1/4 x 2 in.
Stable Gallery ment in deciding the formal aspect of his construc- both of whom have touched on the myth in their work,