The Pinajian Discovery: An Artist’s Life Revealed features over 30 of Pinajian’s abstract landscapes from both Woodstock and Bellport, New York, the two primary locations where he obtained inspiration and painted, dating from 1958 to 1994.
Rarely do we discover a worthy artist who works alone and unheralded. Arthur Pinajian (1914-1999) was one of them. He drew and painted in obscurity until his death in 1999 at the age of 85. Pinajian was a native of Union City, New Jersey. He started as a cartoonist in the 1930s and found considerable success fashioning comic strips for Quality, Marvel, and Centaur Comics. After World War II, where he earned the Bronze Star for valor, he rejected commercial art, attended the Art Students League in New York, and committed himself to the pursuit of serious painting.
In 1999, Arthur Pinajian died an unknown artist whose obsession with art—creating it, thinking about it, writing about it—had consumed his life. He devoted himself to art and created thousands of works on canvas, paper and any other surface on which he could paint or draw. When he died, he left behind stacks of canvases in a dirt-floor garage and the attic of his sister’s home in Bellport, Long Island. The artist had left instructions for his collection to be discarded in the town dump, but, fortunately, Lawrence E. Joseph, the best-selling author of Apocalypse 2012, bought the Bellport cottage in About twelve years ago, Professor William Innes Homer (1929-2012), the former Dean of the Association of Historians of American Art, was asked by Joseph to examine the large collection of art he came into possession. Dr. Homer was stunned by what he found: “a large body of extraordinary abstract landscape and figurative paintings by a highly gifted artist who was completely unknown in his lifetime”. Soon a team of art
2006 after Pinajian’s sister died and rescued the collection just in time.historianswere conducting research into the life and art of Arthur Pinajian.
Dr. Homer concluded: “ultimately Pinajian’s work reflects the soul of a flawed, yet brilliant, artistic genius. When he hits the mark, especially in his abstractions, he can be ranked among the best artists of his era . . . His life is, above all, a model for those who feel that they must follow their calling despite a lack of public acceptance.”
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