Karine “KARISHOK” Dulyan is the architect who returned to paint from blueprint lines to canvas freedom, a contemporary artist reclaiming what childhood always knew.

She almost became someone else entirely.

 For nearly two decades, Karine Dulyan traded paintbrushes for T-squares, designing buildings and urban spaces across Yerevan, Armenia. 

The work was serious, precise, and respectable everything her architectural training promised it would be. But in 2020, something shifted. She returned to what her five-year-old self had already understood: that she was meant to paint.

Today, sitting with the work she’s created since that beginning, it’s impossible to imagine her confined to the rigid grids of architectural drawings. Her canvases pulse with color, rhythm, and an almost musical joy. Yet the architecture never really left her. It simply transformed, becoming something more fluid, more human.

‘Karine Dulyan reminds me I’m serious. KARISHOK reminds me to play.”When you ask her how to introduce herself, she doesn’t hesitate. Both names matter equally; they’re not competing identities, but complementary ones.

Karine is the name her parents gave her, anchoring her to family, to Armenia, to a lineage of people who carried that name before her. It’s formal. It’s grounded. It’s the name on her birth certificate and in her family’s memory.Karishok emerged differently. It started as a childhood nickname, the kind that sticks because it captures something true about who you are.

 Over decades, it evolved into her artistic identity, eventually becoming as real as her given name, perhaps more so. It carries playfulness, warmth, and curiosity. These aren’t frivolous qualities in her work; they’re foundational.”I use both professionally because they’re both me,” she explains. “Karine Dulyan reminds me that I’m a serious person and a proud bearer of my family’s name.

 “KARISHOK is playful, and I am a playful person”. It reminds me to stay connected to the curiosity and openness I had as a child.”This duality, seriousness and play, structure and intuition, and precision and freedom haunt her entire practice. It’s the central tension that makes her work come alive.She doesn’t remember deciding to become an artist. That’s not false modesty; it’s precision. The decision wasn’t made at some pivotal moment; it was made before memory, woven into her very earliest movements. She started drawing as soon as her fingers could hold a pencil. By five years old, she’d already mounted her first solo exhibition.”I think I was just being myself,” she says of those early years. “There was no grand decision. It was just what I did.”Life, however, had other plans. Or perhaps life was simply giving her what she thought she needed: discipline, structure, a practical path forward. Architecture made sense. It was respectable. It was a career. 

For nearly twenty years, she built that life, learned those skills, and climbed that ladder.But something was always missing or perhaps always present, quietly insisting on attention.”Painting was always there,” she reflects. “Even when I was designing buildings, even when I was caught up in the world of architecture, there was this part of me that kept circling back. In 2020, I finally listened to it.

“The timing wasn’t accidental. The year 2020 stopped everyone and forced everyone to reckon with what actually mattered. For Karishok, it was the catalyst she needed or perhaps the permission she’d been waiting for. She committed fully to painting and hasn’t looked back.What does a painter who spent twenty years designing cities see when she looks at a cityscape?”Everything,” she says. “The beauty that everyone walks past without noticing. 

A corner where the light hits an old building just right. The color of weathered plaster. The way shadows change throughout the day. The geometry that’s already there, hidden in ordinary streets.”Her inspirations aren’t grand or exotic. 

They’re intimate: beauty in ordinary life, old buildings, unexpected color combinations, and the way light transforms everything it touches. Music haunts her work too; she’s fascinated by how color and rhythm have equivalents in sound, how a painting can have the same emotional resonance as a melody.

But mostly, she’s moved by memory and the small details we usually overlook. The things we pass every day and never really see.”There’s something about noticing,” she says. “Really noticing. That’s where the magic is. 

Not just what’s extra but in what’s hidden inside of simplicity .”This is where her architectural background becomes not a limitation but a superpower. 

She understands structure, proportion, and perspective, the bones of how things are built. But she’s learned to break those bones, to let them serve emotion rather than rule it.Architecture gave her tools. It also, she’s honest about this, nearly gave her a prison sentence.”My architectural education taught me precision, perspective, and geometry,” she explains. “These are good things. But they can also become a cage if you let them. If you care more about being technically correct than about being true to what you’re feeling.”Her biggest artistic challenge, she recognizes, has been learning to let go of perfection. 

The precision that made her a good architect works against her as a painter. Paintings don’t need perfect perspective. They need honesty. They need life. “One of my biggest lessons has been learning to trust intuition as much as knowledge and to love my mistakes.”This is harder than it sounds. It means painting over work you’ve spent hours on because it’s not alive. It means accepting imperfection as a feature, not a flaw. It means learning that the shaky line is sometimes more powerful than the ruler-straight one.”My favorite works,” she says, “are the ones I begin intuitively, without any plan. I live with them and discover something about myself while painting them. Sometimes they don’t let me go even when I’m tired, and they surprise me, just as children surprise their parents.”The metaphor is deliberate. 

Children aren’t perfect, and we don’t love them for being perfect. We love them for being alive, unpredictable, and themselves. She’s learned to paint the same way.If you want to understand what drives Dulyan, look at her Make Love Not War series.

 It distills everything she believes into color, form, and gesture: love, playfulness, human connection, and an almost defiant optimism about human nature.”Most people are kind,” she says simply. “I really believe that. And I believe that love can be a way to resolve conflicts, to transform them.”This isn’t naivete. 

She’s lived through enough history, in a place that’s lived through enough history, to know what darkness looks like. But she’s also chosen to paint the light. The series is her most personal work because it’s where her politics, her spirituality, and her aesthetic completely align.It’s also the work she’s most proud of, not because it’s technically perfect, but because it’s completely true.She doesn’t begin with blueprints.

 Well, sometimes she does; occasionally she’ll use a projector to transfer basic forms onto canvas. But that’s not where real work lives.”Usually I begin with curiosity rather than a plan,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a color combination. Sometimes it’s a rhythm, a memory, a place that catches my attention. I prefer discovering a painting while I’m making it rather than knowing exactly how it will end.”This is the opposite of her architectural process, where everything must be known before construction begins. In painting, she’s learned to work like a jazz musician with structure enough to hold the work together but improvisation at the heart.

Sometimes these paintings surprise her. Sometimes they exhaust her. Sometimes they refuse to let her go even when she’s tired, demanding more work, more refinement, and more honesty. That’s when she knows she’s found something real.If you’re a young artist sitting where she sat twenty years ago, trying to decide whether to follow the practical path or the uncertain one, here’s what she’d tell you: “Learn your craft, but don’t let technique become your prison. 

Stay curious, make lots of mistakes, and don’t be afraid to follow what genuinely excites you.”She’s also borrowed a line from Henri Matisse, the artist she returns to again and again: “Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.”This is the counter to the mythology of the inspired artist waiting for lightning to strike. Inspiration, she’s discovered, is something you build through the act of working. 

You sit down, you begin, and somewhere in the process, the work begins to speak to you. You find the painting while you’re making it.It took her twenty years to fully believe this. She doesn’t want it to take you that long.

What Karine Dulyan has ultimately created isn’t a bridge between architecture and painting, between her old life and her new one. It’s something more radical: she’s found the space where they merge, where precision can dance with intuition, where structure becomes a stage for freedom.

Her canvases have colors that make you think deeply, and they are constantly evolving. Somewhere between blueprint and dream. Between what she knows and what she’s discovering. Between the serious person she is and the curious child she remembers.

On her canvases, both versions of herself are painting, and they’re making something beautiful together.