About
The artistic director for Creative Lounge, located in Montrose/Glendale, California. Creative Lounge is designed to revitalize and cultivate the art within each of us.
Bio
Achievements
Armineh created a carefree environment for artists to explore and express their art through classes, workshops or individual exploration. Armineh is a certified Person-Centered Expressive Arts Therapy (PCEAT) facilitator. She received her Person-Centered Expressive Arts Therapy training from Dr. Natalie Rogers through Saybrook Graduate University in San Francisco. Her expressive arts workshops encourage personal growth and healing for individuals and groups of both adults and children. Her expressive arts workshops have impacted many locally as well as internationally.
Background
Born in Iran, she pursued a Fine Arts bachelor’s degree at the University of Tehran, where her research on katchkars (cross shaped rocks) won first prize in her program and was recognized nationwide. She received a full scholarship to attend the Alzahra (Farah) University in Tehran for a Master of Art degree in Painting which she completed with high honors. Her thesis focused on women’s role in renaissance art.
While in graduate school, Armineh joined the children’s program at Ararat (an Armenian cultural and sports center in Tehran) and taught drawing and art appreciation. She also held private drawing lessons for children. She managed four annual exhibitions of her students’ works at multiple locations in Tehran and USA, and her student have won prizes at International competitions such as UNICEF and Shankar’s International Children’s Competition (SICC).
Armineh moved to Los Angeles in 1999 and continues to paint as well as teach art and drawing in schools. She has been designing and developing websites for over 5 years, and was Responsible for the design of client websites right from conceptualization stage to its implementation.
Prior to her career in expressive arts, Armineh spent over 7 years designing websites for over 100 companies promoting their business and growth.
Armineh has 15 years of experience teaching art in schools and community centers. She has organized community group art projects for different age groups and facilitated workshops of expressive arts for personal growth and healing for individuals and groups of both adults and children. Armineh has also conducted workshops for organizations that support women around the world including Women’s Resource Center Armenia in Yerevan, Armenia.
She believes in the uniqueness of every individual soul, and thinks that art and Creative-Connection can help every person to find their song in life and dance with it.
Armineh has shown her personal work at Solo and group exhibition, in US and Armenia.
INSPIRATIONS
My Work is inspired by the human world its beauty and its cruelty, its hostility and hospitality, its norms and contradictions all of that culminates into our spiritual world.
I have grouped my work in three stages:
Women of my Time
My early work that was a recognition of the tight framework I and other women in my country had to operate in.
Modern Life in Katchkar Forms
The Armenian heritage that through rich also tightened the my world of options
Self Realization Journey
Recognition of the past, and gathering of energy to move forward.
My abstract dreamlike portraits of fading flowers and fruits show the end product of their life journey. Every stick and flower is uniquely formed by the life it experienced, and as they dry and fade, they tell stories about their lives. Stories about the intensity of the summer light, the periods of rain and drought, and the attacks of insects they endured..
Like a pomegranate that shows its nutritional journey to maturity through its physical formation and flavor, individuals become a reflection of their diet of nature and nurture. The nurture diet in men and women dictates our emotional capacity and how we approach life challenges. I believe we have the power to move forward and reduce how much our past dictates our future.
In my paintings I have shown the different stages of my own life I tried to reflect, a girl’s life born, educated and married in a country that women have few rights. I came to the US with so much hope, for a while I was paralyzed by the choices in front of me unequipped to decipher what was expected from me and what I wanted to be – my journey had not equipped me for this…
My journey has brought me here now. I realized that when the time you will hear the music that is your soul’s tune and that is what you dance with and make a life with.