The first time you see one of Ninamarie Bojekian’s canvases in person, you sense two threads pulling against each other: reverence and risk. She coaxes light from saturated color, pairs meticulous draftsmanship with unapologetic gesture, and lets quiet symbolism do the heavy lifting where louder artists might shout. Her paintings do not simply depict, they remember. They hold the residue of places and people, often Armenian, often diasporic, all filtered through a modern sensibility that refuses to sever past from present. It is tempting to summarize her practice as heritage made contemporary, but that would flatten what she does. The work is personal and historical, patient yet urgent, intimate but never insular.
A life in art rarely travels a straight road. For Ninamarie, the route includes study and apprenticeship, a season of design work to pay the bills, stretches of teaching, and a return to full-time studio practice fueled by grants, residencies, and careful discipline. Along the way, a second name, Marie Bojekian, appears in exhibition notes and catalog footers, a shorthand used by curators and friends alike. The duality suits her. She keeps the long name for formal signatures and her website, the shorter one for texts and labels. The dual naming is not branding. It is how the people around her talk to her, a detail that says more than any formal bio can.
Early patterns and first commitments
Artists usually remember a formative object: a pencil set, a book of reproductions, a relative’s craft. For Ninamarie, there were two. One was an oil portrait of her great-grandmother, a modest work in a gilt frame that hung above the dining table. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it stared back. The other was a box of fabric scraps in her mother’s sewing room, a riot of textures and edge hems coiled like tiny scrolls. As a child she drew faces and hands on printer paper, then tucked bits of thread and cloth into tape-bound collages that nobody was allowed to throw away. Pattern and portrait, line and fiber, biography and surface — these pairings became a grammar before she learned the word.
Her early training felt traditional on the surface. Saturday figure drawing classes. A high school mentor who snuck her into advanced studio blocks so she could work with older students. She learned how to build a canvas and why rabbit-skin glue matters if you care about longevity. She also learned what to ignore. In one story she retells with a shrug, a guest instructor critiqued a charcoal drawing of hers for being “too ethical,” by which he meant it refused to flatter the model. She took it as a compliment. Honesty, even when it costs you likes or quick sales, would become her first rule.
College gave her vocabulary and resources, but not a conveyor belt to success. She split time between painting and art history, writing papers on diasporic memory and making paintings that tried, often clumsily, to enclose that theory in image. She interned at a small gallery where she learned to pack a crate for shipment and how to write wall text that respects the reader. After graduation, she did what many artists do: took a design job, moved apartments twice in 14 months, and painted in the edges of the day. The creative industry’s pace trained her speed. The studio taught her to slow down.
Materials that carry meaning
Visitors are often surprised by the quiet complexity of her surfaces. Up close, you see how she builds: a muted ground in oil mixed with a touch of cold wax for drag, a thin underdrawing in umber, then a series of veils and scumbles that leave breathing room for earlier decisions. She uses sable for glazing, bristle for scrubbing, and a modest wedge tool to soften a ridge without smearing intention. When she needs saturation, she reaches for a high-tint phthalo or quinacridone and then reins it in with a neutral made from burnt sienna and ultramarine. The palette is not austere, but it is disciplined.
Textiles appear often, not as literal collage, but as painted presence. A patterned shawl, a woven table edge, a strip of embroidered floral rhythm. These are rarely photographed from life. She studies antique Armenian textiles, takes notes, redraws patterns from memory, and lets the imperfect recall keep them from becoming mere quotation. In a large painting titled The Map of Bread, a lace motif sits behind a figure’s shoulder, rendered in thin oil with just enough opacity to suggest weight. The motif is not a decal, it is image-as-memory. You sense both the specificity of a grandmother’s tablecloth and the way time sands it down to pattern alone.
The choice to stay with oil painting in a moment when many contemporaries move to digital practice is not nostalgic. She has experimented with digital sketches and uses them for composition studies. But oil holds her attention in a way that no screen can. It resists. It slows the hand, extends time, and keeps the conversation with the surface alive for months. Drying cycles become part of the rhythm, a reason to juggle several works at once. She keeps three to six canvases underway in her studio. If a glaze needs four days, the next canvas gets attention. That staggered attention prevents overworking. It also allows themes to evolve in parallel, like chapters of one long book.
Portraits that carry a room
Portraiture is a dangerous genre. It can flatter or stunt, tip into sentimentality, or collapse into style. Ninamarie approaches the portrait as a contract. The contract is simple: honor the sitter, tell the truth, guard their dignity, and bring your whole self to the work. She schedules a preliminary session without a brush. Coffee, a walk if weather allows, a conversation about who the sitter is and why a portrait matters to them now. She takes a handful of photographs, but refuses to let the camera become the project director. The drawing stage happens from life when possible, even if it means several shorter sessions. Only then does she permit herself to use photos as a reference for hands or fabric folds.
The faces in her paintings are rarely full-smile. They rest in a composed, alert expression that trust can produce. You will see the corners of a mouth gather warmth, an eye narrow because the sun hits the studio at an angle. She aims not for likeness alone, but for tempo. She wants the rhythm of a person, how they enter a space, what time does to their posture. In one portrait of an older violinist, the left shoulder sits slightly higher than the right. A small thing, yet any musician would recognize it. The violin has trained that shoulder for decades.
She refuses to retouch decades out of a face. When a client asks to lose the lines, she counters with a question: which years should I erase? The commission price includes one revision round, and she uses it to tweak color balance or soften an overinsistent edge, not to unwrite a person’s story. Still, she is not doctrinaire. If a client is grieving and wants a posthumous portrait to match an earlier photograph, she will meet that need with care, explaining where translation will change the image, where it can stay faithful.
The diasporic thread
The word diaspora appears often in writing about her work, and for good reason. Armenian history is not an abstract curriculum for her. It is kitchen talk, family liturgy, the background hum of holidays. Yet she resists making trauma the center. The paintings acknowledge loss without staging it. Bread appears more often than ruins. Hands cradle objects. Water glints. These choices are not about denial. They frame survival as an active practice in everyday details.
A series she calls Carrying the Sky follows women across three large canvases. In each, the figure holds something above her head, not in strain, but in poise. In one, it is a steel bowl filled with pomegranates, the fruit rendered as if lit from within. In another, it is a folded rug, geometric patterning softened with time. The last features a clear glass pitcher with a thin line of light at the rim, a painter’s way of saying water without a single drop painted falling. The titles encourage readings: lineage as abundance, memory as shelter, water as promise. Viewers bring their own histories. She lets them.
Her research is quiet. She will spend a weekend reading oral histories, then return to the studio and paint a hand resting on a windowsill with a warmth that says more than any overt symbol could. When curators ask her to write statements, she keeps them short. The more a painting can say without scaffolding, the better. That does not mean she dismisses text. She keeps a notebook where she records phrases that surface while painting. Some become titles. Some become seeds for later work. She rarely quotes poets outright, but their lines echo in the way she measures light.
Teaching as a second studio
Not every artist thrives in the classroom. Ninamarie does, but only within limits she learned the hard way. Early adjunct semesters stretched her thin, four sections across two campuses, leaving little energy for her own work. She adapted. Now she teaches one concentrated studio course at a time, either a portrait block or a thematic seminar on narrative painting. She prefers critiques that start with questions, not prescriptions. Students learn faster when they feel the stakes in their own terms.
Her pedagogy aligns with her practice: process over spectacle, patience over churn. She shows students how to set up a palette with a clear value range, how to pull a clean stroke instead of noodling, when to stop for the day. She insists they take photographs of their work each session, not for social media, but to track decisions. When a painting goes sideways, the photos reveal the moment confidence gave way to fussing. She reminds them that consistency outruns talent over time. She tells them, without rancor, that social media virality is not a practice. It is weather.
In Ninamarie Bojekian workshops outside academic settings, she leans practical. Pricing strategies for emerging artists, packaging work for safe shipping, writing a clear invoice, tracking inventory without losing your mind. She keeps her advice grounded. A fair starting rate for a small commission. A simple policy to handle refunds or reschedules. She shares mistakes of her own — the time a varnish bloom appeared because she rushed curing, or the day a package returned crushed because she trusted a single layer of corrugated cardboard. Students remember the fixes because they come with a story.
The business that supports the art
Romance writes itself around the idea of the starving artist, but good work needs a roof, time, and supplies. Ninamarie runs her studio like a small business. Not joyless, but clear-eyed. She tracks expenses by category, schedules quarterly tax payments, and keeps a separate account for sales and costs. This is not just caution. It is a way to respect the work by giving it infrastructure.
Commission intake follows a short process. Interested clients receive a two-page PDF that outlines options, sizes, approximate timelines, and a straightforward price range. A deposit holds the slot. Contracts are concise, written in plain language. If a client requests a change that alters the scope, she prices it. If a deadline shifts due to drying times, she informs the client early, not the week before delivery. These decisions build trust, which builds referrals.
Her gallery relationships took time. She showed in three juried group exhibitions before a small, well-run gallery in a regional city offered her a solo. She negotiated sensibly — a standard commission split, clarity on shipping costs, and a mutual plan for press outreach. The show sold moderately, not spectacularly, but what mattered was momentum. People saw the work in person, wrote thoughtful reviews, and invited her to speak. The second solo, in a larger city, came two years later with better sales and a catalog that included an essay she appreciated for its refusal to oversimplify.
Risk, failure, and the works that do not survive
Artists do not finish everything they start. Anyone who says otherwise is selling an image, not a practice. In a back corner of Ninamarie’s studio sits a rack with six or seven canvases she calls the orchard. These are the works that need time to decide if they will live or be harvested for stretcher bars and linen. She gives them months. Some move forward, others stop. From a distance the rack looks like indecision. Up close, it is evidence of discipline. Not every idea deserves a full run.
She talks about failure without drama. A series of small interiors where she tried to push perspective into subtle distortion never sang. Great colors, good drawing, no soul. She set them aside. A later painting borrowed a minor element from that series — a doorframe with a double echo — and it suddenly worked in a different context. The earlier attempts were not waste. They were practice for a later rightness.
Risk shows up in scale too. She moves between intimate works and larger statements with intent. A twenty-four-inch portrait demands a different touch than a five-foot figure study. Big canvases can seduce with bravura and mask weak composition. Small ones can charm, then fade. She calibrates. When she feels herself falling into trickery, a habit of relying on a certain glaze or a surefire lighting angle, she sets a new constraint. No blues for a month. Painting from direct observation only. A limited palette. The constraint refreshes her attention.
What the work asks of viewers
If you stand in front of one of her paintings for more than a minute, it changes pace. The initial read — a figure, a table, a cloth — gives way to the way edges touch, how a shadow carries temperature, how a slight misalignment in a pattern keeps the painting alive. The compositions balance areas of rest with areas of incident. Even the quiet corners bear decision. She does not fear empty space. She uses it to let the subject breathe.
Viewers often want to know what the painting “means.” She offers hints and then returns the question. She is generous in conversation, but she protects the work’s right to remain partly private. She knows that a painting can hold two truths: a specific origin in her memory and an open door for someone else’s life to enter. This is not coyness. It is an ethics of encounter. She trusts viewers to bring themselves, and the paintings repay that trust in small recognitions that build over time.
Community, heritage, and naming
Names carry stories. The presence of two versions of hers, Ninamarie Bojekian and Marie Bojekian, reflects how community works. Family uses one, old friends another, galleries sometimes split the difference on postcards and captions. She does not police it. In Armenian circles, she hears both, sometimes in the same sentence. The looseness suits the way she holds identity: steady at the core, flexible at the edges. She sees heritage not as a museum piece under glass, but as a living practice evident in food, language, ornament, prayer, and ordinary care.
She contributes to community beyond canvases. When a local cultural organization needs an auction piece to fund scholarships, she offers a drawing or a small painting, with the caveat that it be presented well, not as a token. She sits on panels about representation without turning them into marketing runs. She consults on exhibitions that aim to include Armenian artists in broader diasporic narratives, pushing curators to avoid lumping distinct lineages into a single category.
Studio habits that sustain the long run
Artists talk about inspiration because it is glamorous. They talk less about maintenance. Ninamarie protects sleep, knows which hours she can paint and which are better for admin, and takes a weekly day off from the studio to see other people’s work. She keeps a small shelf of painters’ monographs within reach. On the list: Vuillard for domestic light, Morandi for patience, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye for figural confidence, Arshile Gorky for lineage and courage. She does not imitate them. She learns how to keep time with them.
Music plays, but not always. When she needs precision, she works in silence, only the soft sound of brush on linen and the small clink of a palette knife on glass. She stretches canvases herself when deadlines allow. The physicality grounds her, reminds her that a painting is an object before it is image. She primes with two coats, sometimes three, sanding between, aiming for a surface that holds paint without swallowing light.
She writes a short studio note at the end of each session. Not a diary entry, just three lines: what moved, what stuck, what to try next. This habit reduces the friction of reentry the next day. When a week goes sideways — an illness, a family need, a broken heater in the space — the notes let her pick up the thread without flailing.
Measuring impact without gimmicks
Metrics have their place. She looks at sales, tracks which subjects resonate, and pays attention to who returns for a second piece. But she resists the trap of chasing data as if it were taste. Trends are gusts. She would rather ask whether the work grew harder and more generous this year than last. Did she risk something real in the studio? Did she honor her sitters? Did she contribute to conversations that outlast the news cycle?
Press helps, of course. A good review can open doors. She keeps clippings, sends thank-you notes, and refuses to game the system with inflated language. When a journalist asks for a statement, she writes it herself, in her own voice, keeping adjectives under control. People can smell hype. They respond to clear intent.
Collectors who stick around tend to value process. They want to know how she balanced a warm earth against a cool gray, why a background leans violet, how many sittings a certain portrait required. She plays open book with technique. Paintings are not magic tricks. She believes that knowing a bit about how something was made only deepens the pleasure of living with it.
Looking ahead without forecasting a brand
Artists who try to blueprint five years of work usually abandon the map by spring. Life interferes. Ideas grow sideways. Still, direction matters. Ninamarie plans to deepen two lines. The first is a set of mid-scale portraits of elders, not as saints, but as contemporary citizens whose faces and hands hold living archives. The second is a body of paintings that examine domestic thresholds — doorways, windows, stair landings — as stages where light and movement choreograph everyday dramas.
She wants to travel to collect more textile studies, but not to feed a travelogue. A residency with quiet time would serve better than a whirlwind tour. She prefers to make slow notes in a small sketchbook and translate them months later, once the fetch of travel has settled. She might publish a book of images with short essays or interviews, but only if it can be done with real editorial care. A book, like a painting, needs to justify its weight in someone’s hands.
A few steady principles
- Honor the sitter, the subject, and the surface. Process is the visible ethics of a painting. Let heritage be a living current, not a museum label. Protect time and attention. The work remembers how you treat it. Share what you know. Technique kept secret shrinks; technique shared grows. Keep the studio humane. Good work needs oxygen, not pressure alone.
What remains after the lights are off
If you visit her studio late, you might catch the moment after cleanup, when brushes are rinsed, palettes scraped, and the day’s canvases leaned and covered with a loose cloth. The room holds a quiet you can feel in your chest. The paintings, caught mid-breath, seem to rest. This is the part nobody photographs. It is where the craft earns its keep, not as spectacle, but as a steady practice of looking, mixing, choosing, and adjusting until the surface holds what words cannot.
The biography of an artist like Ninamarie Bojekian is not a ledger of exhibitions and degrees, though she has those. It is a record of the work’s deepening character. Her paintings have grown more spacious and more exact, more rooted and more open. The names on the wall text — Ninamarie Bojekian, sometimes Marie Bojekian — point to one person, attentive and stubborn in the best sense, learning to carry a past without letting it harden, learning to honor people and objects by painting them as they are, and learning to keep a studio lit for the long haul. That is the art and the soul, and it shows.