The Chair Must Make Noise: The Story of Evgenia Parsadanian-Harris

August 15, 2026

Ashot Poghosyan

Fresno

U.S. Correspondent, Yerevan Online Magazine

In 1989, at nineteen, Evgenia Parsadanian decided to paint an icon.

She had no canvas. No proper brush. She found a sheet of unprimed hardboard and a manicure brush.

A week earlier, someone had lent her a slim volume of Akhmatova. The book had to go back. One line stayed: “A worn little rug beneath the icon.”

Evgenia saw the room at once. Dark. A vigil lamp burning. Young Akhmatova on her knees. At home she found the rug: an old cushion cover embroidered by her grandmother.

Now she needed the icon.

She bought the oils at the Druzhba store on Rustaveli Avenue. She still remembers every tube: golden ocher, dark madder lake, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, phthalo blue, phthalo green, dark Mars brown.

Seven colors. Seven notes.

She worked from a black-and-white reproduction of a Mother of God by Theophanes the Greek. The Virgin looked at the child with a tenderness Evgenia could not explain.

She picked up the manicure brush.

The image broke into patches of color. She put them down fast, one after another, with little idea of what she was doing. The paint piled up on the cardboard. She kept going.

The last patch went on with her finger.

Cadmium red.

Then the face held.

The eyes of the Mother of God looked back at her.

Evgenia sat before the icon until morning. She did not know where the face had come from. She did not know what had guided her hand.

At dawn, another thought arrived. It was simple and shameless enough for nineteen.

What if she was a genius?

Evgenia still counts 1989 among the happiest and most decisive years of her life. That year she understood what she wanted. She met Gayane Khachaturian. She met David Manusajyan, the man she would marry.

The morning after the icon, she had to run to the university.

She was late for mathematical analysis. Berta, her closest friend, sat in the last row. During lectures they drew together, turning professors into caricatures. When the room emptied, Evgenia showed her the icon.

Berta screamed.

The plan came at once. Leave the university. Paint portraits. Sell them at Tbilisi’s Dry Bridge market. Become famous. Become rich.

Berta believed every word.

That evening, Evgenia painted her portrait. During the next two days, she painted herself. Those two paintings settled the matter.

They never reached the Dry Bridge.

Berta later left for Israel. Years afterward, a package arrived from her. Inside was an album of old-master paintings. On the title page, in the handwriting Evgenia knew, were the words: “How I miss you!”

Around the same time, courses in Armenian language and Armenian history opened in Tbilisi for Russian-speaking Armenians. Evgenia went with her mother. One of the lecturers was Bagrat Nersesyan, an Armenian studies scholar visiting from Yerevan.

Evgenia’s mother invited him home. He noticed the two portraits at once. The paint was thick. The faces had force.

“Why don’t you show these to Gayane Khachaturian?” he asked. “She lives nearby.”

Evgenia knew almost nothing about her.

She took Gayane the self-portrait and Berta’s portrait. The self-portrait was hard, dark, heavy with paint. Van Gogh stood too close to it. Evgenia still finds the resemblance painful.

That was how she saw herself.

Gayane looked for a long time. She saw a painter before the young woman had learned to call herself one. The hand was strong. The composition held. No one had trained her, yet she was already building the image in broad fields of color and laying glaze over glaze.

Gayane’s verdict was short.

“No school. No academy. You have everything. Work.”

Evgenia said nothing. At nineteen, she allowed Gayane no right to be wrong.

Gayane began visiting the Parsadanian home. She called before she came. She brought charcoal, watercolors, canvases. She toned the canvases black or cobalt blue.

The door of her own studio was cobalt blue.

For Gayane, that blue carried sleep, fairy tale, a cold dream.

The winters were hard. The apartments were cold. Evgenia’s mother gave Gayane a thick cinnabar-red sweater. Gayane later brought a red volume containing Sebastian Brant’s “The Ship of Fools” and Erasmus’s “In Praise of Folly.” The cover was almost the color of the sweater.

“I don’t want you to part with this color.”

That was how she taught. A few words. Then months of work inside them.

Once, Evgenia was drawing a chair in charcoal. Dry leaves lay on the seat. She had softened the shadows and handled the whole thing too carefully.

Gayane looked.

“Not like that. Draw it so the chair makes noise.”

She took the charcoal and drove dark lines across the paper.

The chair made noise.

Another time she said, “Draw from memory.”

The subject could remain before Evgenia’s eyes. She was not to become its slave.

There were shorter judgments.

“It’s weak here.”

“It’s all the same here.”

The worst word was “effect.”

“This is terrible. This is an effect. Go to the academy. Everyone paints like that there.”

Nothing more.

Evgenia went home and took the sentence apart.

The formal lessons did not last long. Other people’s styles did not cling to her. Gayane understood that before Evgenia did. She proposed a harder arrangement: bring each new painting for judgment, then sit in the studio and watch.

Evgenia sat quietly. She did not interrupt.

Gayane usually painted seated. Bach, Handel, or Pergolesi played in the room. She would aim for a long time, then make one exact move. Sometimes she remembered that her student was there.

“Look. I placed cobalt blue beside orange. Now I’m breaking that unity with white. Do you feel what has begun?”

Evgenia now leaves three narrow bands on every canvas: blue, orange, and white between them.

Most people do not see them. She knows where they are.

They are not a signature. Gayane remains in the paint.

In the Parsadanian home, painting lived beside music. Evgenia’s mother, Maria Akopovna Kirakosova, was a musicologist with a doctorate in art history and worked at the Tbilisi Conservatory. Her son played double bass. Evgenia played cello.

When Gayane came, they played for her.

Evgenia’s father was an engineer. Quiet. Self-contained. Close to nature. In his hands, an ordinary task acquired order. He stretched canvases and built frames for his daughter.

Her parents did not resist her choice. Her mother waited for each new painting. Her father prepared the surface on which it would appear.

The family was Armenian and wholly Tbilisi. On her father’s side, the ancestors had lived in Sighnaghi and Lagodekhi. On her mother’s side, they had come from Kars and Erzurum.

They spoke Russian at home. At about twelve, Evgenia began teaching herself Armenian. First a primer. Then Tumanyan. Then the Bible.

Georgian sounded all around her. Her inner voice remained Russian.

She loved old Tbilisi and the remains of Armenian life in it. A church entered almost every landscape she painted.

The dome held the space together.

Her surname carried the city’s history too. Her father’s eldest sister bore the name Ter-Parsadaniants. The middle sister and Evgenia’s father had become Parsadanovs. At eighteen, Evgenia began trying to restore the Armenian form. Papers disappeared. She started over. Then stopped.

At last, she used Parsadanian without waiting for an office to approve it.

Gayane had promised to take her to Yerevan and introduce her to Henrik Igityan.

“Work a little more. Then we’ll go.”

Igityan could recognize an artist before the crowd did. He had recognized Gayane early.

They never made the trip.

Evgenia married David Manusajyan. They had four children.

Then the nineties began.

The electricity went out. The gas was cut. Some days there was no water. There was no heat, no washing machine, no disposable diapers. The house took the day.

She could paint at night.

Some nights.

Gayane used to say, “I always leave when they stop working.”

Evgenia did not stop. She painted in her head.

She calls the years from 1993 to 2010 silence.

Her hand worked little. Her eye did not stop.

From the outside, the painter had almost vanished. Inside, the work went on.

While she raised the children, problems in painting followed her through the house. How do you paint glittering snow with dirty colors and no white? How do you build volume without light and shade? How do you make depth after giving up linear and atmospheric perspective?

She worked out the answers in her mind. From time to time, she found a canvas and tested one.

Mathematics did not interfere. Programming had taught her not to fear a problem because it first looked insoluble.

A method formed. Intuition stayed. Now she could examine what intuition had done.

When she returned to regular work, the silent years showed themselves. Her hand had worked little. Her eye had been studying.

In “Self-Portrait with a Crown,” shown in Fresno, the young painter’s rush has tightened into control. The surface is held more firmly.

Evgenia does not mourn the change.

The inspiration remained. She had learned what to do with it.

In 2010, the Union of Armenian Artists of Georgia was formed at the Hayartun Center. The painter and miniaturist Meruzhan Shahumyan invited Evgenia to join.

A later biographical dossier called her a cofounder. She corrects it. The union already existed. Shahumyan was its president. She worked beside him and took part in every exhibition to which the group was invited.

Meruzhan had known her since the Gayane years. He introduced her to other artists and presented her work to the embassy and cultural organizations.

One thing stayed with him: whatever happened, Evgenia returned to the canvas.

There were exhibitions in Tbilisi, Javakhk, Etchmiadzin, and Moscow. She joined the League of Georgian Artists. Paintings entered private collections.

The conductor Felix Korobov bought two. They are kept at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theatre.

The Israeli composer and conductor Arie Bar-Droma acquired “Girl with Tomatoes.”

The archive has holes.

Catalogs disappeared. Paintings left without photographs. Owners’ names were forgotten.

Years later, Evgenia found “Still Life with Two Violins and a Mirror” in an online gallery. She no longer remembered who had bought it or how the photograph had reached the internet.

Her face is in the mirror.

The still life kept its name.

The self-portrait entered by reflection.

A biography written by someone else can make a life cleaner than it was. One dossier claimed that during the nineties Evgenia traded paintings for food and fuel.

She did not.

David Manusajyan was a known jeweler, a metal conservator, and a master of electroforming. Clients came to him from Moscow, Israel, and Europe. He supported the family.

Evgenia could paint and raise the children without asking what each canvas might bring.

She had to ask later.

In 2015, David died.

An accident.

The centennial year of the Armenian Genocide.

After his death, Evgenia was left with the children and her ailing mother-in-law. Almost everything from the post-Gayane years left her hands for little money. Buyers bargained.

She could not.

She let the paintings go.

She misses “Misty Flowers” most. It was a large still life with a mirror. She worked on it for a long time. A reproduction printed on canvas hangs in the Fresno exhibition.

No one knows where the original is.

Evgenia would buy it back.

At a different price now.

She had always found it hard to part with a painting.

Need changed the circumstances. It did not change the loss.

After David died, she painted almost without stopping.

The colors remained bright. The paintings were dead.

There came “The Funeral,” “The Dying Dog,” “Sturgeon in a Supermarket Aquarium,” “Dead Rooster,” “The Forgotten Meal,” and “Christmas Piglet.”

Other pictures stayed in her head: a dead soldier among dandelions, a cat’s skeleton among irises, chickens hanging upside down before a butcher’s shining knife.

She did not paint all of them.

Evgenia cannot bear “The Madman and the Massacre.”

She keeps it turned to the wall.

The image came from Ruben Sevak’s monologue on the Adana massacre. A man crosses a field of corpses with his dead father over his shoulders.

His mind gives way.

God, he thinks, has died. God’s enormous body fills the sky.

The madman points a threatening finger at heaven.

Behind him, the crucified Christ hangs and watches.

At an exhibition, Gia Markozashvili, president of the League of Georgian Artists, would not believe at first that a woman had painted it. Then he invited Evgenia to join the league.

She accepted.

She turned the canvas back to the wall.

Art did not console her after David’s death. It gave her work when everything else had fallen in.

That did not make depression beautiful.

Her dreams were heavy. Death had taken the place of the man who was gone and, for a long time, would not leave it.

Evgenia called one of her bleakest paintings “The Pianist’s Funeral” and posted it on Facebook.

The American physicist Todd Harris saw it. He had recently lost his wife.

She had been a pianist too.

Todd wrote.

Their first exchange did not sound like two strangers introducing themselves. It moved through singularities, gravity, homeomorphisms, symmetry, rational and irrational numbers, the predictive power of mathematics, Richard Dawkins, and life at the tips of stems.

That was enough.

Todd thought in the way Evgenia loved. Scientific precision did not shut out poetry.

David had thought that way too.

They married.

Evgenia says they pulled one another out of death’s rule.

They did not erase memory. They did not cure grief. Death simply stopped governing every day.

They agreed not to argue about politics. Everything else remained open.

Todd writes poems, music, and children’s stories. Evgenia translates and illustrates them. He studies the illustrations at every stage and intervenes.

She asks him to.

Todd’s sister, Tracy Harris, lives with them. She is a flutist, educator, and composer. She helped prepare the Fresno exhibition and played at the opening.

A flute now sounds in the California house.

Before, the music had come from Evgenia’s mother’s room, from cello and double bass, from Bach in Gayane’s studio.

Painting still has music beside it.

Today Evgenia can enter what she calls “artist mode” without waiting for inspiration.

When she was young, inspiration had to come first.

Now she can call it to work.

She calls this “reining in inspiration.” Her gaze changes. The room falls back. The hand stays under control.

A painting begins with an idea. Then she lays broad masses of acrylic over the ground. The composition is set early. An error there only grows.

She continues in acrylic.

Then oil.

Long passages of glazing.

Layer after layer.

Dense, almost fleshy brushwork meets the methods of the old masters.

Evgenia likes round brushes.

She does not like pastels.

She does not like palette knives.

The subject no longer confines her. Gayane had warned her not to become its slave. Now Evgenia decides why an object is there and what work it must do.

The object still matters.

A well-painted carrot, she says, borrowing Cézanne, can turn Paris upside down.

Calculation does not tell her when a painting is finished. At some point, the surface balances.

One more stroke can ruin it.

Sometimes it does.

The painting that existed a moment earlier is gone.

Evgenia listens to other people’s interpretations without fear and without much reverence.

It is easy to find a meeting of ancient and Armenian cultures in “Euterpe with a Duduk.” The reason was plainer. Euterpe was supposed to hold an aulos. Evgenia heard Jivan Gasparyan’s duduk in “The Passion of the Christ” and changed the instrument.

“There is no national idea here.”

“The Feast of Trimalchio” was later shown at a benefit exhibition for Ukraine. The painting had been made earlier. It was not about the war.

Its sources were Petronius and Fellini.

Late Rome.

Cheerful shamelessness.

The grand style going rotten.

She also asks that her participation in an exhibition of church art in Moscow not be turned into a political declaration. Helping Ukraine was a humanitarian act. The Moscow project was an art exhibition.

Other people may attach an agenda to a canvas. She does not accept it for herself.

On August 7, a solo exhibition by Evgenia Parsadanian-Harris opened at the Armenian Museum of Fresno. More than fifty canvases covered almost thirty years of work. For the American audience, her name was new. For Evgenia, the line ran back to Tbilisi, to the hardboard and the manicure brush.

The largest canvas was made for Fresno. It measures 48 by 60 inches. Evgenia painted it in July, in two and a half weeks, with the opening close.

She called it “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors,” after Sergei Parajanov.

The figures came from old family photographs. They are her ancestors on her father’s side. They seem to rise from a landscape without a fixed time, as though the family had come up through the earth. Past and present occupy the same ground.

The painting held the center of the exhibition.

The Fresno show began with a photograph of a lemon tree.

Evgenia and Todd had come to the Armenian Museum. Todd showed a staff member a photograph of the painting his wife was working on. The woman was interested.

They were introduced to the museum’s founder and director, Varoujan Der-Simonian.

Todd showed him more paintings and a booklet.

That was enough.

The lemon tree appeared on the invitation.

Varoujan found the title: “ART That Transcends Borders: A Voice That Leaves a Lasting Impact.”

Evgenia does not argue with it.

The route to Fresno ran through a Tbilisi apartment, Gayane’s studio, David, four children, seventeen years of near-silence, paintings whose addresses she no longer knows, then California.

She did little to promote herself. The work interested her more. The art market required another profession.

Todd now handles that part.

Evgenia trusts him.

The Fresno show was her first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

She already had a long exhibition record.

California was seeing her for the first time.

Someone asked what she would do if Gayane Khachaturian walked into the gallery.

She would not be afraid, Evgenia said.

Only curious.

She would lead Gayane from painting to painting and listen. Any hard word. Any riddle. Then she would go home and spend a long time working out what she had heard.

As she once worked out what Gayane meant by a chair that had to make noise.

Gayane has been gone a long time.

Evgenia still misses her.

At Gayane’s funeral, she lay in her studio before a sky-blue mural painted directly on the wall.

The blue door closed.

Three narrow bands remained on Evgenia’s canvases.

Blue.

Orange.

White between them.