This artwork is truly a labor of love for Arthur, who spent many months in daily 12-hour shifts creating the piece. The premise behind this beautiful study in color is simple enough- the twin painting features exactly 1.5 million brush strokes, divided evenly between the two canvasses, with each stroke standing for one victim of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, in which an estimated one million and a half Armenians perished at the hands of Ottoman Turkey and its tribal allies.
The paint color utilized to create the painting is red, symbolic of the blood of the genocide martyrs, and also standing for the bright red symbol of passionate obsession with the historic suffering of the Armenian nation.
For Arthur, like every self-conscious Armenian, the genocide is not an event in distant historic past; rather, it’s a painful living memory that gets passed from generation to generation and whose aftershocks still reverberate through the fabric of the Armenian nation to this day. The Armenians are still seeking to find healing and recovery from this first Holocaust of the 20th century.
For years, Artur strived for the same measure of closure on a personal level that his nation yearns as a whole. He thought of ways to channel these feelings through an artistic outlet and by a stroke of luck, found his perfect media at an intersection of graphic art and visual performance.
In creating 1.5 million, through its labor-intense and vividly visual process of coloring the canvasses red by scores upon scores of brushstrokes Arthur experienced a sense of inner release of the tension caused by the unresolved sorrow and unmediated grief of the Armenian genocide. Of course, the painful fait accompli that the genocide brought with it -that the Armenian nation has largely been scattered in diaspora and dispossessed of most of its historical lands - remains unchanged.
Yet on an individual level, the unending soul-searching has been finally brought to peaceful terms in Artur’s mind, as he found a way to repay his generational debt to the genocide victims by honoring each of them individually through this artistic creation.