From The quARTerly

Winter 2004

by Jerry Williams

Some artists are finite draftsmen with meticulous drawing skills. Other artists are illustrators, even storytellers. Some invent new lenses of perception. Some are expert composers who weave together space with form and shape. Sarkis Antikajian is a Painter. His work is a bodacious celebration of brush dipped in paint and spread across canvas.

While some painters claim they paint light, Sarkis Antikajian paints energy. He leaves his viewer breathless by the onslaught of his transcription. His masterful use of intense chroma ravishes the visual cortex in a heady embrace. Sarkis wields color with the same bravado as trumpeter Maynard Ferguson plays C above high C.

Armenian by birth, Sarkis received his degree in chemistry from Beirut University and then immigrated to the United States. After years employed as a pharmacist he returned to his foremost passion, painting. He built his rural home and second-floor studio on a knoll among orchards that he planted 30 years ago. Sarkis states unequivocally, “I’ve never been happier in my life.” His joie de vivre is so vividly expressed in his work that it is infectious.

 

House by the Lake