Sarkis Antikajian: Enjoying full time art

EVER SINCE HE was a little boy, Sarkis Antikajian only really wanted one thing out of life: to be an artist. He's done a few other things along the way. He immigrated to the United State from the Middle East. He married and raised two sons. He had a career as a pharmacist. He built his own house and garden in the Willamette Valley. But all the while, Antikajian never lost track of where he was headed. And above all, he never stopped drawing and painting, creating lush, colorful images in the style of his favorite post-Impressionists, like Van Gogh. In one sense, his entire life until now has served as a long apprenticeship for the journeyman artwork he produces today.

Now, his other jobs are behind him. His sons are grown. His house is built. He's retired from the Eugene pharmacy where he used to dispense drugs. He's built a fine new two-story studio on the six acres he and his wife own near Cheshire. At last, Antikajian is free to paint all day long and into the night - and paint he does, producing canvas after canvas. Landscapes. Portraits. Figure studies. A downstairs room is full of finished paintings waiting to be framed. "When I was 8 years old, I used to dream that this is how my paintings would be," Antikajian says in a slight accent that betrays a childhood in places like Beirut and Amman. "I am lucky to be here. I am very lucky."

Antikajian was born to Armenian parents who had fled to Transjordan to escape persecution in Turkey. He grew up in Jerusalem and Amman, attending Franciscan schools before studying chemistry - he picked science because he feared he could not make a living from art - at the American University in Beirut, which was then a lovely, cosmopolitan city, the Paris of the Middle East. "It was such an exciting city," he says. "It was unbelievable." Antikajian worked for a while in sales for a medical company, then registered at the University of New Mexico's pharmacy school.

New Mexico? Well, he says, he was used to a desert climate and, perhaps more important, he didn't have any relatives near at hand.

There he met his wife, Karen, and ended up working in a pharmacy in Gallup, N.M., a hot, dusty and awful place to the two of them. So they packed their sleeping bags into a '64 Chevy pickup (still parked in their driveway today) and headed north, camping all the way to Eugene, where they looked around and said to themselves, this is the place. They bought six bare acres and built a house, put up a barn, strung fence wire and planted trees, creating the feel of a cozy desert oasis in the grasslands around them. Antikajian is mostly self-taught as a painter, learning almost entirely by doing. "I paint a lot," he says. "Not all of it is good. If you get just one good one out of 10, you've got it made. It's a very frustrating job in one way because you can't guarantee anything. But the next day is another day. You keep painting."

His work now sells steadily at Alder and other galleries around the Northwest, including, most recently, the Lawrence Gallery in Sheridan, but Antikajian has never worried very much about marketing himself. He says, with apparent sincerity, that he doesn't covet artistic honors and doesn't care whether his work ever appears in a museum. You get the impression he would simply give his work away if he could afford to. "I am not a salesman," he says. "But there is nothing else I would rather do than paint."

Over the past 20 years, Antikajian has progressed from a high degree of realism to gradual abstraction. There are still recognizable shapes and figures in his work, but a painting of a flower garden is not necessarily about flowers or gardens but about color and form. "Sometimes I work from photographs, but if the photograph is really good, I have no desire to improve on it," he says. He pulls out a three-ring binder filled with loose watercolor sketches, images he sometimes creates at night while watching television or listening to music. The pictures are dreamlike, ethereal.

This is a man with a lush imagination. When he talks about art, it's never with a capital "A." Most art today, he says, is derivative from the Western tradition, making small adjustments without huge, heroic gains. That doesn't bother Antikajian one bit. "Art is going off in all directions now," he says. "And all of us are just feeding off art history. Rarely do you see anything that is 100 percent original. We are all having fun doing whatever it is we are doing. But none of it is earth-shattering. Even myself. What's the use? What's the big deal? But you can't think that. Because you just want to do it. Even if no one else cares, you just want to paint."

July 17, 1998