Exhibition of Raphael Aslanyan at the Tomsk Art Museum

During the next month, an exhibition devoted to the memory of the Tomsk painter, teacher, professor of the TSPU Raphael Egorovich Aslanyan will be operating at the Tomsk Regional Art Museum. Devoted to the the artist's 70th anniversary, the exhibition will include the works of Rafo, as the master of the brush and canvas called himself, as well as the works of his pupils. During the opening ceremony, the museum's deputy director Nikolai Vasenkin quoted a famous classic: "Those from whom we learn can be called our teachers, but not every teacher deserves that title."

Employees of the Art Museum recalled the life, profession and creativity of Raphael Aslanyan :

"There are good artists, there are good teachers, and there are those who managed to blend these two talents: Raphael became a teacher for young artists of Tomsk. Rafo is a truly teacher. For several decades of pedagogical activity in various educational institutions if Tomsk he carefully brought up dozens of pupils and followers, many of whom forever linked their destiny with fine art and became independent masters.

Working as a teacher at the Tomsk College of Culture, at the Tomsk State Pedagogical University, Raphael Aslanyan remained a teacher even outside the walls of official educational institutions - he was the head of the studio at the Tomsk Art Fund, he gathered with students in his workshop. He always had a lot of students who considered it an honor to learn from such a master. All of them remember RaphaelYegorovich with warmth and great respect. In 2018, Raphaelwould would have turned 70 years old, and the exhibition, originally conceived as a broad retrospective of the work of Rafo, with the artist's departure was meaningfully and formally changed. This jubilee exposition that became a tribute to the respect, memory and gratitude of numerous students to their dear teacher.

Raphael Egorovich Aslanyan was born in 1948 in the Armenian city of Kirovakan (now Vanadzor). He received his education at the Yerevan Art and Theater Academy (1971-1976), where his teacher was the People's Artist of the Armenia Sarkis Mambreevich Muradyan, a student of the great Martiros Saryan. The first exhibitions of Raphael begun in 1978. Personal exhibitions took place in Russia and abroad, including the USA. Since 1998, the artist lived and worked in Tomsk.  Over these years his name has become a landmark of our city, and his work is an integral part of the cultural space of Siberia.

Aslanyan offered the viewer his own vision and understanding of the world around him, an opportunity to find an answer to the complex questions of being. Raphael Aslanyan was an outstanding colorist,  who used all the possibilities of color: from bright contrasts to subtle nuances. The creative search, the desire to change, the expression that can be found in all the works of the artist, became the defining elements of his author's style and were assimilated to a different degree by his students.

The students of Rafo have travveled around the country, many continued their education in the art colleges of Krasnoyarsk, Moscow and St. Petersburg, but they managed to preserve the spirit of friendship that was formed in the hospitable workshop of Aslanyan. Interesting, multifaceted, working in a variety of techniques - they all feel united by the bright sunlight that their teacher brought to severe Siberia from his native Armenia. "Rafo taught us to be artists, through pure and sonorous colors he put solar heat into our hearts, shared not only his technical techniques, but his own special energy." We want his energy of love for the world to continue to live in our works" explains the concept of the exhibition one of the organizers, the artist and teacher Anastasia Khartularia.