“I think with my eyes, hear with my heart, and paint through the movement of Spirit. And within all of this — a reflection of Light.”
The Language of Light and Inner Breath
Anush Babayan’s creative journey stands as a powerful testament to the profound connections between knowledge, emotion, and expression. Born in Yerevan, Armenia, she has spent much of her life moving between disciplines: philologist, painter, and associate professor. She blends intellectual rigor with artistic instinct. At the Russian-Armenian University, she has developed and taught original courses such as “Axiology of Art,” “Aesthetic Communication,” and “Creative Art Therapy,” each designed to explore the fertile ground where logic meets feeling and theory meets creation. For Babayan, teaching is not just about transmitting knowledge; it’s about shaping perception, encouraging introspection, and making space for transformation. Her academic and artistic lives aren’t separate threads. They form a single, evolving conversation, each informing and enriching the other.
Babayan’s relationship with painting began not in her youth, but in a moment of awakening at the age of 58. The act of holding a Chinese brush for the first time in 2012 unlocked a language that had been waiting in silence, embedded within her for decades. What followed was a surge of creativity that felt less like a beginning and more like a return home. Just nine months later, in April 2013, she held her first exhibition, an early milestone in what would become a prolific artistic journey. Over the next twelve years, she presented 14 exhibitions in Yerevan, 7 in Minsk, and 12 across various states in the United States, with further international opportunities on the horizon. Recognition followed swiftly. In 2022, she was honored with the Person of the Year award in the field of painting. Her works, created entirely without preparatory sketches, have graced the covers of literary and scientific publications and have been praised by psychotherapists for their resonant energy and emotional clarity.
In her words, Babayan paints “with silence, colors, and the breath of my soul.” This quiet power is neither metaphor nor embellishment. It is the core of her practice. Each brushstroke is an unfiltered gesture of spirit. While her formal background gave her a solid intellectual grounding, it is the ineffable, what exists beyond language, that drives her art. Her paintings arise from meditative stillness and embody fleeting emotional and spiritual truths. Her work does not merely depict. It reveals, with each piece serving as a moment of philosophical insight rendered through movement and hue.
The Sacred Eye: A Closer Look
Truly engaging with Anush Babayan’s art means stepping into an experience that goes beyond analysis. Her paintings aren’t just meant to be looked at; they ask to be felt. Each piece seems to hold a quiet meeting point between breath, the cosmos, and inner awareness. Two works in particular, Mother of the Universe and Eye of the Universe, show how she moves beyond the limitations of medium to connect with something deeply personal in the viewer.
Mother of the Universe (2019) presents an ethereal face, gently emerging from an ocean of cosmic textures. At first glance, the image appears to dissolve and coalesce in the same instant. The left side of the face, rendered in soft silvers and violet shadows, evokes serenity and introspection. The right side bursts open into radiant golden rays and electric blues, suggesting not just expression but eruption, the birth of light itself. Here, Babayan is not portraying a figure so much as a force. The feminine archetype she channels is neither passive nor decorative. She is dynamic, generative, and infinite. The compositional spiral, reinforced by curved strokes and celestial textures, creates a gravitational pull that draws the eye inward in meditative rhythm. The layering of mineral pigments adds physical depth to the spiritual intensity, making the surface shimmer with presence. There is no boundary between face and cosmos. This mother is not in the universe. She is the universe.
Eye of the Universe shifts from the generative to the revelatory. A single eye, calm and watchful, hovers at the center of an abstract field shaped like a lunar eclipse or cosmic womb. Light descends in narrow rays across the form, like a divine incision or cosmic pathway. Around the central sphere, turbulent clouds of gold, smoke, and indigo churn with kinetic energy. Ink-like gestural markings dance at the edges, suggesting ancient scripts or frequencies of thought not yet decoded. The contrast between the stable gaze and the chaos surrounding it creates a dynamic tension. Is the eye witnessing creation, or conjuring it? Is it the eye of the artist, or the divine? There is no fixed answer, only an invitation to look deeper. In this piece, the metaphysical becomes palpable. Vision is not an act of looking. It is an act of awakening.
Both works encapsulate Babayan’s distinctive practice and her refusal to separate the material from the spiritual. Her use of Chinese brushes and rice paper is not a stylistic affectation. It is a philosophical commitment to immediacy and impermanence. These pieces are not composed in the traditional sense. They are revealed, emerging from a space of quiet listening and channeled rather than constructed. The textures, marks, and light sources in each painting feel like echoes of another realm, fleeting yet enduring.
Anush Babayan: Between the Cosmos and the Soul
Babayan’s artistic style grows out of a place where skill meets intuition. Her work doesn’t follow a specific school or genre. Instead, it reflects an ongoing conversation between Eastern philosophies and her own inner world. She uses traditional tools like Chinese brushes and rice paper not just for how they look, but because they let her paint with spontaneity and feeling. Her process is instinctive and free-flowing, guided more by emotion than by any fixed plan.
Rather than conceptualizing a painting in advance, Babayan enters each work as one might enter a prayer or meditation. The results are compositions that feel less like images and more like transmissions, expressions that arise from stillness, carried by breath and silence. Her palette often draws on elemental tones: purples, golds, silvers, and blues that reflect both inner depth and cosmic resonance. Across her body of work, themes such as spiritual expansion, sacred femininity, and the search for unity emerge not through narrative, but through gesture, light, and symbolic abstraction.
Babayan’s work invites the viewer not only to observe but to enter the space of the painting. What may initially appear as abstraction soon reveals itself as a mirror for something internal: the archetypal, the ancestral, or the divine feminine. Rather than offering fixed meaning, each image becomes a point of connection, a visual meditation meant to be experienced through emotion and intuition. Her exhibitions often incorporate poetry and music, forming immersive environments that reflect her interdisciplinary vision.
Silence, Space, and the Flow of Creation
In Babayan’s creative space, silence is not just a backdrop. It is an essential presence. Her studio is stripped to its simplest elements: light, quiet, and a sheet of rice paper. This minimal setting allows emotion to move directly into form, without interference. She often speaks of leaving the world behind while she works, entering a deep state of focus where even unwanted sounds are drawn into the rhythm of the brush. These interruptions don’t distract her. Instead, they become part of the process. Painting, for her, is a quiet conversation with stillness, where time seems to pause and awareness becomes fully present.
The way she prepares for each piece is both ritual and personal. Before she begins, Babayan reads the writings of Narekatsi, the mystic Armenian poet whose words she finds calming and purifying. This sets the tone for a spiritual space where creative instinct can flow freely. As she paints, she listens to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His compositions, with their balance and structure, guide her movements like a gentle rhythm. The result is full immersion. Her brushstrokes begin to move with her breath and thoughts, and as that alignment deepens, the surface disappears and only the essence remains.
Babayan’s connection to other art forms has never faded. Her journey began with music, and she graduated from music school with honors. Alongside that, she developed a lasting love for poetry and philology. These interests never ran on separate tracks. Over time, they came together as part of a larger, unified vision that now shapes her creative projects. Music and text often find their way into her exhibitions, creating layered, multi-sensory experiences for the viewer. One of her long-held dreams is to publish an album that combines her paintings with poetry and music. For her, the arts are not separate languages, but different voices within the same conversation.
Anush Babayan: Bridging Borders with Light
Although Babayan’s late start as a visual artist might seem unconventional, her vision is expansive and forward-looking. In 2024, she initiated a project titled “Silent Dialogues,” exploring the unspoken connections between visual art and spiritual experience. This year, she is building upon that momentum with “Art Without Borders,” a venture dedicated to dismantling cultural divisions through shared creative language. Her ultimate aspiration is even more ambitious. She envisions an international collaboration titled “Guardians of Light.” This project would unite women artists from across the globe who are committed to beauty, spirituality, and emotional truth.
In “Guardians of Light,” Babayan sees more than just collective creativity. She sees healing. By creating visual meditations infused with therapeutic energy, she hopes to produce artworks that function not only as visual pieces but also as tools for self-connection and inner alignment. The project would involve exhibitions, publications, audio-visual materials, and global events that bring people together through artistic empathy. At its heart lies the belief that art has the power to reconnect individuals with themselves and with the universal. Her vision is as much about awakening as it is about aesthetics.
Babayan’s dream stretches toward Japan, a country she speaks of with deep respect and quiet admiration. She feels a strong connection to its spiritual depth and refined sense of beauty. More than anything, she longs to stand in its silence and absorb the light she already tries to capture in her paintings. What she hopes to share across borders is simple but powerful: love, beauty, and gratitude. Her work reminds us that art is not limited by language, culture, or geography. It is a bridge built through emotion, understanding, and presence. In this spirit, Anush Babayan continues to reach both outward and inward, inviting others not just to look at her art, but to feel the quiet music that lives within it.
