1944 - ...
Valery Geghamyan's name is well known among art experts and collectors, his symbolic painting and super-analytical graphics have their admirers for a long period of time and their circle is constantly growing. However, the artist's identity is still a mystery.
Valery Geghamyan was an amazingly secretive person. The boundaries of his inner world turned out to be insuperable even for those close to him. The lucky ones who even approached these boundaries can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand. This publication is all the more significant, because it is not the value judgments of other people and not multiple repetitions of equally poor information in the media, but the thoughts of the maestro himself.
The submitted handwritten document was found in the artist's family archive. An old, narrow hardcover notebook, filled from start to finish with text and visual information, temptingly promised discoveries. But for a long time, it was outside the art criticism discourse. The author kept his "diary" in Armenian and, first of all, it was required to translate it with high quality. The extremely scrawled handwriting and figurative fragmentary speech made the task difficult.
The narrative in the manuscript is not kept consistently chronologically as in the "classic" diaries, therefore it received only the conditional name "diary". In fact, it is a collection of the artist's thoughts on the history of art, painting technique, world and Armenian history, philosophical reflections. The manuscript contains working sketches of future paintings and literary works, poetry, reminders of the author to himself, live observations of the amazing Armenian nature and contemporaries.
The translator translated the original as literally as possible, therefore, unfortunately, in some places the stylistic sophistication of the author's written speech is lost. When translating it was decided not to use artistic editing and to preserve the informational component of the text as much as possible, although at the cost of partial loss of the figurative component.
The artist was undoubtedly gifted in literature.
The most surprising thing in the diary is that the author, being very young, anticipated his entire artistic life. He formulated and wrote down artistic goals and methods of achieving them for the next five decades. Everything that Geghamyan created in Odessa (1964-2000) was described in detail by him in the forties.
On the first page the date is indicated – 1944 – it is the beginning date of work on the manuscript. Most of the recordings were created during Valery Geghamyan's studies at the Yerevan Art Institute. This bright period of his life was associated with Martiros Saryan, teacher and patron of the artist. The time of studying with the master was one of the happiest in Geghamyan's life. Ahead, it seemed, was all life in art, success and recognition. And so it happened – all life is in art, nothing but him. And what about success and recognition? They came anyway.