- Aug 25

Vahe Yeremyan

Vahe Yeremyan is a contemporary landscape painter who has a huge body of work consisting of almost 3,000 oil paintings to date. He has exhibited throughout the United States and Armenia in recent shows at Apophenia Gallery, Eisele Gallery, and Castle Gallery of Fine Art. Notable solo exhibitions include features at Silvana Gallery in Glendale, California and the French embassy in Armenia. Vahe has participated in notable art fairs such as The Other Art Fair, Beverly Hills Spring Art Show, and the LA Art Show. His first place prize awards include recognitions at Cutter & Cutter Fine Art Gallery in St. Augustine, Florida, National Museum of Republic of Armenia, and Silvana Gallery. Vahe has also been featured in Saatchi Art’s catalogue and curated collections.

The vast majority of paintings consist of landscape and seascape paintings executed with a flair in between tradition and experimentation. Containing brushstrokes which resemble small slabs of paint and pale pastels, Vahe’s most interesting forms usually come in how he depicts rocks and earth. The soil and stone appear almost like exercises in controlled color field painting with their drastic variation in tone depicted in planes of color.

These landscapes appear to be alive and moving, Vahe paints nature like how a figurative painter would paint flesh. Containing angular compositions and form, he creates optical distortions to the perspective as if the viewer were not witnessing the landscape at ground level, but rather from up above or below. There are some experts who argue in the case of landscape painting being a dead or obsolete art form, however Vahe proves them wrong with a timeless embrace of nature with his vibrant contemporary muted pastel color palette, elastic forms, and unique, flat brushwork. Like a hurricane, various debris such as water particles, forms of earth, and foliage swirl in lucid motion across the surface of the canvas.

Sea Waves (pictured above) remains one of Vahe’s most monochromatic paintings except with drastic variations in blue and hints of warm pastels in the distance. The painting depicts vast portions of negative space with the large body of water and open sky with smears of paint of varying tone indicating clouds and waves. The land takes up a minimal portion of the painting which acts as a counter-balance to the empty vastness of the landscape.

Vahe Yeremyan’s paintings stand out as a revival of expressionism in contemporary art. While much of today’s art deals with direct forms and indirect interpretations, Vahe counters with indirect forms and direct expositions. The paintings express nature with a renewed palette while still paying homage to masters such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas with their respect to capturing light with color. With an enormous body of work and a knack for color and brushwork, Vahe creates enduring art which connects us with our basic instincts and senses.