<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a quiet corner of her world, where brushstrokes meet memory and color bleeds into emotion, Mariam Harutyunyan sits with the weight of an unfinished journey. At 28, she has spent nearly two decades painting, dancing, singing, and recently, spinning records as a DJ. Yet she still doesn’t have all the answers and she’s made peace with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Call me \u0544\u0561\u0580 ( Mar) ,” she says, with an insistence that carries warmth. “Never without the ‘jan.’ I won’t accept it any other way.” This is the kind of person Mariam is: deeply affectionate, even when the moment doesn’t demand it. Even when it seems excessive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She wears the paint under her fingernails and the chaos of the studio in her eyes, and she doesn’t apologize for it. In a world that tells you to play it safe and keep your edges clean, she stays messy and wide open, bleeding her heart onto the canvas for everyone to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is something untamed in this insistence . In a culture that values restraint, Mariam chooses excess feelings. In a life that could have been linear, she chooses multiplicity. And in an art world that often demands specialization, she refuses to choose just one way of creating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her story begins not in a city studio, but in the fields and valleys of Sisyan, a small city in Armenia’s Syunik province. She was a wild child, running barefoot through mountains and meadows with her grandparents, surrounded by goats and open sky. The domestic animals became her companions. The valleys became her playground. The fields were her first classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I grew up as a wild person,” she says, and there’s nostalgia in her voice, not for simplicity, but for that kind of freedom. The freedom to move without permission. To feel without explanation. To exist in your body without self-consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those early years, muddy, free, untamed, shaped everything that came after. When she paints now, she’s still drawing from that well. When she moves, she moves like someone who learned rhythm from rivers and wind. When she creates, she creates with the lack of apology that only comes from having once been truly, completely free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I’m glad to have these memories to cherish when I’m older,” she reflects. But more than that, she’s grateful for what those memories taught her, that art doesn’t have to be dignified or proper. It can be wild. It can be muddy. It can be made with dirt under your fingernails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
–<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s a shadow in her family history that matters. Her uncle was a painter.He was talented, ambitious, and ultimately defeated. He never finished. He left his art incomplete and walked away from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps this haunted her. Perhaps this inspired her. Or perhaps it did both simultaneously, the way family legacies always do, carrying weight and possibility in equal measure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The uncle’s incompleteness could have been a warning. It could have been a curse. Instead, Mariam seems to have taken it as a different kind of instruction: that art is not about finishing. It’s about continuing. It’s about what you do with the knowledge that you might fail, that you might leave things unfinished, and do it anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mariam started dancing at eight. She was a child performer, learning the language of the stage early. She sang. She moved across stages with the kind of confidence that comes from loving the spotlight, from understanding that your body is an instrument of expression. By thirteen, when her uncle noticed her creative hunger, he did what her parents couldn’t afford to do, he placed her in a painting class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was an act of belief. An act of recognition. He saw something in her, and instead of letting her potential dissolve the way he had, he actively intervened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For five years, she trained in the classical tradition. She learned structure, technique, and anatomy. She learned how to see the world through a realist’s eye: accurate proportions, faithful colors, the world as it actually appears. It was rigorous. It was necessary. It was also, in a crucial way, not hers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I was painting like someone with complexes,” she remembers, and there’s no bitterness in this admission\u2014only clarity. “Like I was supposed to. Not like I wanted to. I was following the right line, the right color. That was knowledge, but it wasn’t what my heart wanted.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This distinction matters. Mariam understands something fundamental about the difference between learning and becoming. You can master technique without ever touching your own truth. You can paint beautifully and still be painting someone else’s dream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The realist training gave her tools. But tools are only half the story. The other half is knowing what you want to build.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three years ago, something shifted. She stopped asking permission\u2014even from herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I discovered I’m an expressionist,” she says simply, as if stumbling into your own artistic identity is something that happens in a moment, when really it’s the culmination of hundreds of quiet rebellions against your own conditioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The transition wasn’t gentle. It required her to unlearn everything the realist training had cemented into her bones. It required her to question whether accuracy mattered more than authenticity. Whether faithfulness to the external world mattered more than faithfulness to her internal one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It meant painting not what she saw, but what she *felt*. It meant accepting that her work would be messy, subjective, imperfect, and that this was the point. It meant embracing the expressionist principle that the artist’s emotional truth is more important than the subject’s external accuracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“A person paints as their soul does,” Mariam explains. “I freed myself from my complexes. Now I paint freely. You must be who you are. Your work ultimately becomes independent of you. It becomes you. A bit happy, a bit sad, a bit humorous, whatever you are, that’s what shows up on the canvas.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This realization, that the work becomes a mirror, is both terrifying and liberating. It means you can’t hide behind technique anymore. It means your flaws are visible. But it also means that when something works, it works because it’s *yours*.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She paints in layers, instinctively. A brush, drawn with conviction in a single gesture. Then color, layered on top, finding its own way through the composition. She doesn’t overthink it. She trusts her hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes she sketches first, mapping the terrain of an idea before committing to canvas. This happens when the work demands it, when she can feel that the idea needs structure before it can breathe. But mostly, she trusts the moment. She trusts her time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I feel the breath of my time in everything,” she says. “I try to feel the new and the old in art and understand my truth in it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This approach to creation is radical in its simplicity. No elaborate planning. No predetermined aesthetic. Just presence. Just the willingness to show up and let the work emerge from what you’re feeling right now, in this specific moment in your life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ask Mariam what moves her, and she won’t give you a neat answer. There’s no single muse, no prescribed source. Everything is material. Everything has potential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A stranger’s glance. The architecture of someone’s eyes. A chord progression that catches her off-guard. The way light falls in an ordinary room at an unexpected hour. A dance move that someone performs without thinking. A memory of fields that surface unexpectedly. The expression on a friend’s face. The sound of rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The world is an inspiring phenomenon,” she says, and you believe her because she’s clearly spent her whole life paying attention to it. She’s not someone who’s waiting for inspiration to strike from on high. She’s someone who understands that inspiration is everywhere, constantly, if you’re awake enough to see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“People are inspiring. Emotions, joy, sadness, they’re all inspiring. A beautiful moment in nature. A musical chord. A dance movement. In short, my artistic motivation comes from everywhere. It’s constant.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not the answer of someone who has mastered their craft and can explain it systematically. This is the answer of someone still building it, still discovering what moves them, still learning to recognize inspiration in new forms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, unexpectedly, she added another string to her bow. She became a DJ.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It shouldn’t be a surprise. It shouldn’t feel like a departure. But in a world that often demands specialization, that asks artists to pick one medium and master it completely, becoming a DJ when you’re already a painter and dancer and singer feels like another act of creative rebellion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It wasn’t a dramatic career shift. It was more organic than that. She’d always loved music, the selection, the curation, the power of choosing the right song at the right moment. When friends started complimenting her taste, her ear, the way she could read a room and choose accordingly, something clicked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Why not?” she thought. And so dj_Artist1998 was born, a nod to her 1998 birth year, a signal that she’s still learning, still becoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The music selection appealed to her for the same reasons that painting does. You’re choosing colors, but they’re songs instead. You’re creating a journey, taking people on an emotional arc. You’re reading your audience and responding in real-time, the way a dancer responds to music or a painter responds to the canvas emerging beneath their brush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Music listening and choosing songs and doing mixes, people appreciated my taste,” she recalls. “And I thought, why not try DJ work? I liked it. I’m going to try to develop this.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It shouldn’t be surprising that someone whose life is art would move fluidly between mediums. Paint, dance, music, DJing, they’re all the same thing, really. They’re all about listening to yourself and translating that truth into form. They’re all about reading the world and responding authentically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Among all her work, there’s one portrait that matters to her: “Lady Chan Chon Xin-Jin, a Japanese girl whose character she essentially invented. She laughs when she says the name, she admits she created it, but the portrait itself is serious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The work emerged on canvas with the kind of inevitability that suggests it was always supposed to exist. The color transitions work. The character comes through. There’s something in the rendering of the eyes, the way the face is constructed, that suggests a person you could almost know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The color, the transitions, the character, it came out right,” she says. “It works.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the closest she comes to satisfaction, not completion, but rightness. The portrait doesn’t feel unfinished. It feels *true*. It captures something real about this invented person. And in capturing something real about an invented person, perhaps it captures something real about the artist who invented her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The portrait also reveals something about how Mariam works. She doesn’t need to paint real people. She doesn’t need to observe from life. She can invent a person ,give them a history, an identity, a name, and then paint them with such conviction that they become real on the canvas. This is the power of expressionism. The artist’s vision becomes more important than the external reference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mariam’s philosophy about her own art is disarmingly honest: she still doesn’t know what she’s looking for. She suspects she never will. And instead of seeing this as a failure, she’s reframed it as the actual nature of artistic practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I’m 28, and I’ll say that I still haven’t found ‘a thing’ in my art,” she admits. “I still don’t know because art doesn’t like living by plans. It’s the flight of my moment. It’s my sense of time. You paint and paint and paint, and over time, you see where you’ve arrived in your art.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There’s profound wisdom in this. She’s rejected the narrative that says artists should have a coherent vision, a consistent style, a recognizable aesthetic. Instead, she’s embraced the idea that an artist’s work is a record of their becoming, a document of who they are at different points in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“My art is my life. My ups and downs. I show myself through my work. I display the breath of my time, the breath I’m feeling in that exact moment.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This approach means that her work will never be uniform. It means that her paintings from three years ago might look different from her paintings today, and her paintings today might look different from her paintings next year. This inconsistency isn’t a flaw, it’s the whole point. It’s proof that she’s alive, that she’s growing, that she’s not trying to preserve some perfect version of herself in amber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When asked about the difficulties, Mariam doesn’t talk about money or time or access to materials. Instead, she identifies something more fundamental: the challenge of transition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The difficulty is changing from a realist state to the art you truly want to create,” she says. “As a student, I painted by following the correct line, the correct color. That was knowledge, but not the art my heart desired. The real difficulty was letting go of that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This resonates beyond painting. It’s the fundamental challenge of becoming yourself, of unlearning what you’ve been taught to be, of releasing the versions of yourself that were created to please others or fit into systems, and discovering who you actually are underneath all that conditioning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many people never make this transition. They spend their entire lives painting in the realist style they learned, never questioning whether it’s what they actually want. Mariam’s willingness to make the change, to suffer through it, to accept that she might have to give up years of training to find her truth, takes a particular kind of courage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What strikes you when talking to Mariam is that she doesn’t speak about art as something you do occasionally, when inspiration strikes. She speaks about it as a constant practice. A meditation. A way of being in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“You paint, and you paint, and you paint, and you paint, and you paint,” she says, letting the repetition sink in. “And with time, you see where you’ve arrived in your art. There’s no endpoint. You just keep moving”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Forget the muse. Forget genius. That whole romantic image of the artist, tortured, waiting, producing masterpieces in bursts of divine inspiration, it’s bullshit. It’s an excuse. Real art gets made by people who show up to their practice whether they feel like it or not, who work through the boring days and the frustrating days, who understand that inspiration is a myth we use to avoid doing the actual work.This is the reality of artistic practice: showing up, doing the work, trusting that something will emerge over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s unglamorous. It’s also the only way anything real ever gets made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The practice itself becomes the point. Not the finished work, though that matters. But the daily act of creation, the constant dialogue between artist and material, the slow building of skill and understanding, that’s where the real work happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you ever sit down to create something, whether it’s your first attempt or your hundredth, Mariam has one piece of advice: \u201cArm yourself with patience.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not the patience of waiting. The patience of returning. The patience of understanding that real art is a struggle with yourself, and that there is no endpoint. There’s only the daily choice to show up, to paint, to feel, to let your work become the mirror of who you are right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Real art is a struggle with yourself,” she insists. “There’s no endpoint. You just keep returning. That’s the practice.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Patience isn’t about sitting still. It’s about showing up broken, tired, furious and doing the work anyway. It’s painting over the same canvas for the hundredth time because something inside you won’t let it go. It’s the unglamorous grind, the failed sketches, the deleted paragraphs, the hours where nothing clicks and your hands won’t obey what your brain sees. It’s not peaceful. It’s stubborn. It’s messy. It’s choosing to create even when you can taste the gap between what you imagined and what you actually made and doing it again tomorrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The progress lives in places no one sees. In the slight confidence in your movements. Instinct guides your choices. In the invisible hours that only you know all about. This patience is relentless, active, and everything an artist needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s understanding that growth in art isn’t linear. Some days you’ll paint something that surprises you. Other days you’ll paint something that feels flat, false, wrong. Both are necessary. Both are part of the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The patience she’s talking about is also the patience to accept that you might never figure it all out. That you might reach the end of your life still searching, still learning, still discovering new things about your art. And that this is not a tragedy, it’s the whole point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In many ways, Mariam represents something increasingly rare, which is an artist who refuses to be finished. Not in the sense of incompleteness, though there’s some of that too but in the sense of refusing to arrive at some final, perfected version of herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She doesn’t have a signature style that you’d recognize immediately. She doesn’t have a manifesto or a coherent philosophy that explains everything she does. She has a practice. She has sensitivity. She has the willingness to keep learning and keep changing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is threatening to people who want art to be comfortable, recognizable, easy to categorize. This is exactly what makes her work matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the end, Mariam has done something her uncle couldn’t do: she’s continued. Not in the same way she paints expressionist work while he presumably painted realistically. Not in the same medium exclusively, she dances, she DJs, she creates in multiple forms. But she continued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She’s taken his unfinished legacy and transformed it into permission to never be finished. She’s taken his incompleteness and made it into her practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And she’s doing it with the kind of fierce affection, the kind of warmth that insists on being called by diminutive names, the kind of wild joy that comes from someone who spent her childhood running through fields with no one telling her to be still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I’m still learning,” she says simply. “I’m developing. This is my path.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And in saying so, she’s offered something rare\u2026.not answers, but a way of being. Not finished work, but an ongoing conversation. Not a destination, but a way of traveling that makes the journey itself the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because perhaps the most important masterpiece isn’t the painting on the wall. It’s the becoming that never stops happening. It’s the artist who wakes up every day and chooses, again and again, to paint.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a quiet corner of her world, where brushstrokes meet memory and color bleeds into emotion, Mariam Harutyunyan sits with the weight of an unfinished journey. At 28, she has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3194,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"hide_page_title":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n