Our Mission
Our Mission at Xpress Art Center is to encourage children of all ages to develop their full creative potential through visual arts. We strive, through the fine arts, to create a unique environment in which children of all ages, abilities, and experience can feel free to imagine, create, and welcome the arts into their lives.
Xpress Art provides a professional arts environment that is challenging, rewarding, and creative, and respectful of ideas and individuals.
About Us
Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.” -- Picasso.
Though it seems like yesterday that Xpress Art Center opened their doors, we are celebrating its fifth anniversary. This years’ exhibition will present a display of various artworks by the new students, returning students, and students whom have been a part of the art school for years.
Founders Lyudmila Garayan and Armen Atomts are the driving forces behind this community gem and worthwhile institution of culture and refinement. The center is open to people of all ages but the majority of its students are constituted of children and young adults. The opportunities and prospects that will be accessible and available for these children are boundless. Not only does this center provide a place for a creative outlet, it teaches children discipline, focus and advances their intelligence in ways, that general education could not. In a world full of cell phones and computers, which whittle children’s brains numb, or all the other negative influences that children could face, Xpress Art Center is a refuge of art, literature and history.
Art engages children and people of all ages by stimulating inspiration and inventiveness, which aids in focus, self-esteem, self-discipline and self -motivation. The activities that students take on at the center are more than just splashing about in water color; it opens up a flowing river of depth and understanding. Students gain the tools necessary to communicate thoughts and ideas in a variety of ways and prepare young minds for a future of invaluable experience. Students of Xpress Art Center are introduced to a variety of mediums: oil and acrylic paint, pencil, ink, charcoal, pastels, graphic design, and mixed media such as collages.
Students of the art center have gone on to places of higher education where they implicate all that they have learned from their instructor and the other students. Future architects, fashion designers, engineers and media professionals are in training as we speak. The art classes these students have taken at Xpress are more than just a pastime activity. For them it is supplemental education; placing them ahead of other students taking the same subjects and providing an important balance in their total educational experience. With the lessons they have acquired from the center, they are “ahead of the game” in all aspects of life.
Today more than ever communities need establishments like Xpress Art Center. Time and time again the center has demonstrated its importance to enhance education, creativity, self-improvement, and motivation for the betterment of one’s life. The efforts and results of the art center have not gone unnoticed. Upon its many other certificates, recognition from the Western Diocese of the Armenian Church, The City of Glendale and the California State Assembly as assigned by Paul Krekorian has been received. We are all in the presence of greatness and we hope to see Xpress Art Center and the people that operate it to flourish and touch more lives.
By Amy Avetikian
