 |
Pete Najarian | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1940 (age 83–84) Union City, New Jersey |
Peter Najarian (born 1940) is an American novelist, short story, and nonfiction writer. He is also a painter and sculptor, and a cousin of painter Art Pinajian.
| |
Pete Najarian | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1940 (age 83–84) Union City, New Jersey |
Peter Najarian (born 1940) is an American novelist, short story, and nonfiction writer. He is also a painter and sculptor, and a cousin of painter Art Pinajian.
After graduating from Rutgers University in 1958, where he roomed with the poet Robert Pinsky, Najarian was a Social Investigator for the New York City Department of Welfare, where his caseload was in Harlem.
He then lived in London for three years, where he taught English Studies in Kingsway Day College, and Film Study for the Education Department of the British Film Institute.
He returned to the States when he received the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University for the academic year 1967–1968.
He received an M.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1970, where he studied with his friend, the novelist Leo Litwak.
He was a Fulbright Lecturer in Soviet Armenia in the academic year 1988–1989. While in Armenia he helped to recover survivors after the earthquake, and the short work called “The Girl” in his collection "The Great American Loneliness" is about his experience there.
He has taught creative writing in San Francisco State University, Wayne State University, Scripps College for Women, University of California at San Diego, University of Hawaii, University of California at Davis, and University of California at Berkeley. He contributed to the Serving House Journal of Literary Arts, [1] and to a compilation titled The Sixties, [2] edited by Peter Stine and published by Wayne State University Press.
He received a Grant for Creative Non-fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2000. His works were cited during a discussion of Armenian American literature [3] at a symposium celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Society for Armenian Studies.
Najarian is also a plein air painter and a sculptor, and his work has been exhibited in the Artist’s Union in Yerevan, Armenia; in the Hearst Gallery [4] at Saint Mary’s College of California; in the Napa Valley Museum in California; and at Berkeley Public Library. [5]
His last four books are illustrated with his drawings and paintings.
The Paintings of Art Pinajian, A Family Story, is an illustrated non-fiction novel by Pete Najarian about his cousin, Art Pinajian.
As Najarian tells the story, Pinajian had verbally left his paintings to him but left no written will. His book recounts how these paintings were taken from him after Pinajian's death and later sold to Lawrence E. Joseph, who then hired Peter Hastings Falk to promote them. The book seeks to prove that Pinajian never wanted his work “thrown into the garbage,” as was stated by Falk in his promotional book, Pinajian, Master of Abstraction Discovered, [6] which states, "Pinajian left instructions for his collection to be discarded in the town dump."
Najarian's book also seeks to prove in the course of Pinajian's letters to him that his cousin was in fact a "most sane human being" who was a "popular and attractive and humorous man and who was out-going and socially responsible and whose isolation in his later years was only a result of his poverty."
From Art’s letters to his cousin Pete: "It is between me and myself that I work now…. My work is a reflection of what I want my life to be…. To understand the totality of art is to arrive at its creation…. If you are conscious of Totality, time will coalesce everything into one…. Searching for forms is terrific therapy and makes me feel good and refreshed…. No one notices, of course, except the creator and sometimes not even he.”
Pinajian's art was subsequently valued at $30 million. [7]
"Pete Najarian writes prose in the very particular American tradition that includes Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, and Jack Kerouac. The Naked & The Nude is, by my count, the seventh volume in his epic autobiographical narrative that works the territory between lyrical autobiography and the novel to tell his story and the story of his generation. Najarian’s subject—like Wolfe’s Saroyans, Kerouac’s—is the male artist and the unsortable way in which a mix of sexual hunger and literary ambition, the hunger for a home and a belief in the transformative power of art, become both a wound and a way in the world. In Najarian’s case this story has as its ground Armenia, the story of the early twentieth century genocide, an immigrant life in America, and a fierce current of damage and love that works its way through the generations. As for art—it also matters that Najarian is a remarkable painter which makes The Naked & The Nude as much a book about seeing and making as it is a book about sexuality. The intensely vivid paintings and drawings reproduced here are reason enough to have the book on your shelf." —Robert Hass
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation.
William Saroyan was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. When the studio rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, The Human Comedy.
Percy Wyndham Lewis was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited BLAST, the literary magazine of the Vorticists.
David Park was an American painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in painting during the 1950s.
Donald Jess Bachardy is an American portrait artist. He resides in Santa Monica, California. Bachardy was the partner of Christopher Isherwood for over 30 years.
Robert Menzies McAlmon was an American writer, poet, and publisher. In the 1920s, he founded in Paris the publishing house, Contact Editions, where he published Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.
Barry Gifford is an American author, poet, and screenwriter known for his distinctive mix of American landscapes and prose influenced by film noir and Beat Generation writers.
Yōga is a style of artistic painting in Japan, typically of Japanese subjects, themes, or landscapes, but using Western (European) artistic conventions, techniques, and materials. The term was coined in the Meiji period (1868–1912) to distinguish Western-influenced artwork from indigenous, or more traditional Japanese paintings, or Nihonga (日本画).
William Michaelian is an Armenian-American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. Born in Dinuba, California, a small town southeast of Fresno, Michaelian grew up on his family's farm. He has lived in Salem, Oregon, since 1987. His stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in literary periodicals in the United States and Armenia; his work has been performed on Armenian National Radio. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Ararat, a quarterly journal devoted to literary and historical work on Armenian subjects. He is also a contributor to the multilingual Armenian Poetry Project, curated and produced in New York by Lola Koundakjian. In 2003, he launched an open online literary dialogue, "The Conversation Continues", with John Berbrich, publisher and editor of the small press literary quarterly, Barbaric Yawp.
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures were generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being.
Arthur A. (Art) Pinajian was an Armenian American comic book writer. He was active as a comic book creator from the late 1930s throughout the 1950s, during the Golden Age of Comic Books, and as an artist from the 1950s until his death in 1999. He was a member of the Eisner-Iger Studio in 1938-39 and of Funnies, Inc. in 1939-42. Pinajian created the Quality Comics characters Madame Fatal and the Invisible Hood, also known as Hooded Justice and Invisible Justice.
William Keith was a Scottish-American painter famous for his California landscapes. He is associated with Tonalism and the American Barbizon school. Although most of his career was spent in California, he started out in New York, made two extended study trips to Europe, and had a studio in Boston in 1871–72 and one in New York in 1880.
Tim Z. Hernandez is an American writer, poet, and performer. His first poetry collection, Skin Tax (2004), received the 2006 American Book Award, and his debut novel, Breathing, in Dust (2010), was awarded the 2010 Premio Aztlán Literary Prize, and was a finalist for the California Book Award. In 2011, Hernandez was named one of sixteen New American Poets by the Poetry Society of America. In 2014 he received the Colorado Book Award for his poetry collection, Natural Takeover of Small Things, and the 2014 International Latino Book Award for his historical fiction novel, Mañana Means Heaven. In 2018, he received the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano Letters administered by UC Santa Barbara, and in 2019 he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Peter Selgin is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, editor, and illustrator. Selgin is Associate Professor of English at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Jack Katz is an American comic book artist and writer, painter and art teacher known for his graphic novel The First Kingdom, a 24-issue epic he began during the era of underground comix.
Armenian genocide in culture includes the ways in which people have represented the Armenian genocide of 1915 in art, literature, music, and films. Furthermore, there are dozens of Armenian genocide memorials around the world. According to historian Margaret Lavinia Anderson, the Armenian genocide had reached an "iconic status" as "the apex of horrors conceivable" prior to World War II.
Varazdat Samuel "Varaz" Samuelian was a prominent Armenian American writer, painter and sculptor.
Otto Wilhelm Sohn-Rethel (1877–1949) German lepidopterist and a painter of the Düsseldorf school of painting art movement. Sohn-Rethel was a member of the art groups, Sonderbund group and Young Rhineland. The prominent theme of his art was always young men, and frequently they were nude.
Cleo Theodora Damianakes, nom de plume Cleon or Cleonike, was an American etcher, painter, and illustrator. She was widely known for designing dust jackets for Lost Generation writers in the 1920s and early 1930s, including cover art for the first editions of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald's All the Sad Young Men, which were published by Scribners. Other authors she designed covers for included novelists such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Conrad Aiken, John Galsworthy, and Arthur B. Reeve.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
