Hagop Najarian

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Hagop Najarian and his family immigrated to the United States in 1969. As an Armenian living in La Mirada, he drew strength from the strong ties and grounding that his family and close community provided. Watching his father and grandfather create elaborate wood furniture with simple tools was the foundation and driving force in Hagop as an artist.

Pursuing his undergraduate studies in art at Fullerton College and receiving his BFA in drawing and painting at Cal State Univ. Long Beach provided a traditional technical foundation. In 1993 he began his graduate study at Tyler School of Art at Temple University through their prestigious study abroad program in Rome, Italy and Philadelphia campus.   

Hagop Najarian is a working artist and college professor living in La Mirada, California. He is a Professor of Art teaching Drawing and Painting at Cerritos College since 1999. He was the Art Department Chair from 2009- 2014 and the Cerritos College Art Club Advisor from 2000-2014.

In addition to exhibiting his work locally and nationally, Hagop has curated group exhibitions, and lectures about his work at seminars, panel discussions and colleges in the Los Angeles area. He is a co-founding member of the art collective Museum Adjacent and also a member of Durden and Ray and High Beams, which are locally run artists collectives that have developed many exhibitions throughout Los Angeles, nationally and Internationally.

His recent body of work “Home Turf” is a series of paintings that reunites his history of figuration with my previous series of abstract paintings. The intersection of these two genres culminates in the synthesis of color, sound, gesture and memory. 

As an ongoing record of his visual DNA, these paintings ignite both the audible and visual senses within his creative process as a painter and musician. The imagery in the paintings summons the emotive powers of memory, euphoria and nostalgia, providing a dialogue for the viewer and their own senses of color, gesture and joy. “We are all a culmination of our own life experiences as we reflect on our Home Turf”. The current paintings are a natural synthesis of Hagop’s studio practice of music and painting.