Bright Day

Born in 1989 in Kirovakan (now Vanadzor), Armenia, Mher Chatinyan is the worthy heir to the traditions of the Armenian school of painting. Coming from a family of artists, he is the grandson of the painter Albert Chatinian and the son of Hamlet Chatinian. After graduating from high school in 2006, he became interested in painting and drawing. His first teacher and his first source of inspiration was none other than his father, a painting and art history teacher. Mher's pictorial style, in its expressive manner and in the freedom of its brushstrokes, occupies an intermediate position between figurative painting and abstraction. However, he never loses touch with reality, but nevertheless blurs the boundaries, leaving room for the viewer's imagination. Flooded with nourishing sunlight, Armenian nature left an indelible imprint on his perception of the world. Color – vivid and saturated – occupies the main place in his art: most of his canvases vibrate with the warm rays of the sun. The work of the Russian artist Mikhaïl Vrubel (Omsk 1856 – Saint-Petersburg 1910) exerts an enormous influence on that, contemporary, of Mher Chatinyan. Despite the joyful tone emanating from the work of the Armenian painter, it is in Vrubel that he finds immeasurable wisdom and strength, coupled with great artistic depth. His ecstatic works, imbued with a powerful mystical spirit, transmit all the tones of human feeling. This characteristic is found indirectly in all his works, in which the color hides the inner life of the model, the landscape or nature. For the Armenian painter, true art is both rooted in his century and in eternity. Because it manifests the true spirit of its time and at the same time embodies eternal truths – it never loses its relevance. In the midst of an autumnal landscape with honeyed tones whose golden leaves twirl and fall around three birch trees with ashen trunks, a dark and solitary figure stands out in the foreground of the work. Is she advancing towards us or is she walking towards the Slavic church with the blue door shown in the center of the painting? Crowned by three crimson bulbs, the architectural edifice rises into Heavens whose cold flake pallor already seems to foreshadow the arrival of the snowy winter.