Armenian village 1969

Martiros Sarian made this drawing of an Armenian village in 1964, and looking at it I can almost feel the graphite dust on my fingertips. It must have been really exciting to work on this piece, building up the layers of marks to create the landscape, one little line at a time. I can imagine Sarian trying to capture the essence of the place – not just the way it looks, but the way it feels to be there. He’s making marks, breaking them down, smudging them, almost as if he’s in dialogue with the landscape, the mountain and the village responding to one another through him. The way the graphite sits on the surface gives the drawing a real sense of texture, doesn’t it? You can almost feel the roughness of the paper, the soft give of the graphite as it moves across the surface. Sarian probably wasn’t thinking about any one thing in particular as he was making this, and that’s what’s so great about it. It feels like it just came together. There are dialogues between artists happening across time, and it makes you think that somewhere in this drawing, you can see what came before and what might come next.