A few years back, I’d best not tell you just how many years, a rather precocious high school student by the name of Tom Wudl was allowed to take a UCLA extension art class from an artist named Charles Garabedian. Now you see where I’m going with this. Both Tom and Charles are now represented by the same Gallery (LA Louver) and have remained close friends since Tom somehow managed to graduate from his High School. To this day, Tom considers Garabedian a painter’s painter, so it is little wonder that he arranged a visit for his tutored artists to Garabedian’s studio on Washington Blvd.
The studio is of good size with two big skylights casting, unfortunately, a rather uniformly cold and dreary light throughout the place. The ample wall space is covered with quite large (most of his works are large size) acrylic paintings, some on canvas but most of them on paper. Why is this so? Because Garabedian feels more in touch when he’s working on paper which, for him at least, is less intimidating than when he works on canvas; the paper surface responds better to his touch. Since much of his painting is done on paper, he prefers to paint in a horizontal position (on a table, what did you imagine?) than in a vertical position. I asked him why he switched early on in his career from oils to acrylics? And discovered that it was for practical reasons only, he loves the end product of oils but since his painting style constitutes fast constant revising over and over again, acrylics really hits the spot for him.
As soon as Garabedian spoke, he made absolutely certain that we understood that his self -imposed artistic mission consisted of one or more of three principles. The first is the creation of things primal, you know, things that are first in time or things of first causation. The second is the depiction of archetypal things, universalities maybe even Jungian so called notions of the collective and unconscious inheritance of ideas, thought patterns and images where things are not clearly identified. You can tell I’m not really a follower of Jung right? Thirdly, he’s interested in depicting things that embody monumentality. Succinctly, Garabedian is more interested in the “big bang” period than in any final entropic future of our universe, and that’s O.K.
Like all of us, you spot a little bit of contradictions here and there, which in Garabedian’s case indicate a painter who is not afraid to contradict himself because as I discovered, it’s just another chance for him to explore the unknown.
Garabedian is extraordinarily influenced and motivated by the mythical, especially from Homer’s Iliad as well as Greek tragedy. He also tells us that other artists, especially Poussin and Morandi motivate some of his paintings, one in particular, where he puts his spin on how he sees both of these artists combined. Tom Wudl pointed out his strongly held belief that “Art always comes out of art”, Tom is more daring with the word “always” than I am. He maintains, and rightly so, that an artist develops a visual vocabulary, call it a sort of visual literacy, from those artists that have come before him or her, after which the artist must take it into a new realm of personal creativity. To Wudl, Garabedian has achieved all this, having created a sort of “Garabedian archetype” in itself.
Suddenly, Garabedian whips out a painting where he tells us that here, he deliberately created and started from absolutely nowhere and kept making sure nothing was ever planned throughout its execution. Why so? He said that he wanted to confuse the viewer, confuse himself and make something interesting with little if any meaning other than the organization of shapes, color and other formal aspects.
But he also tells us that when he can take an idea and develop it, he can maintain his enthusiasm for it and can’t wait for the moment when he can see the final result. Adding that “Then you know you are an artist, when you take something and then make something out of it”. I’ve recently come to experience this in my own painting.
Things are winding down but before we leave Wudl mentions how disquieted he is because many viewers, usually not artists, misread Garabedian’s paintings. Many imagine him as a surrealist painter. I pointed out that that’s not so crazy as it seems, some of his early works do in fact look a bit surrealistic. Truer to the mark, however, these same critics also consider Garabedian’s paintings to be examples of naiveté and primitiveness; in other words untutored. To the contrary, Wudl points out, he’s admired by so many other artists because the power behind his creations is the very outcome of a deliberate overriding and uncompromising genuineness and honesty; a clear moral imperative to be direct and sincere about his art. The last thing on his mind is to show off or pander to the crowds.
Well, everything that I observed about Garabedian on this visit, including his paintings, echoed someone who was indeed very direct and without any hidden agendas, in fact this characteristic absolutely oozed from his presence. I was most impressed that here, in this very studio, was an artist that truly painted just for his own visions and it only needed to make sense to him in order to have any meaning or posses’ any validity. So as I was leaving I whispered in his ear, “Charles, you’re an existentialist at heart”. “What is that?” he responded (keep in mind he studied philosophy). “You know,” I answered, and he does!