Having studied carefully the short summaries on Anna Saryan’s art, I came to the conclusion that there would be little new that I could offer in my article. I found myself helplessly unanimous with all those who had expressed their delight with the painter’s “amazing drive”, with her “perfect sense of colour” and winning artlessness. Besides, facing the spontaneous force of Saryan’s manner, I found myself unwilling to use the cliche language of art historians when saying something you say nothing. Still, there is a trait that other critics overlooked, or rather did not name. Saryan’s art possesses a very important quality, which has been ignored, and, in my view, it is fearlessness.

Strange as it may seem, but I am not willing to explain what I mean, although my task as an art historian is supposed to be explaining things. In fact, I am sure that anyone with a grain of sensitivity to art, once he sees Anna Saryan’s pictures, will be able to understand what I mean. More, I will also need to be fearless in some sense when, breaking the rules of the formal style of an article like this, I dare tell you a simple, maybe very simple, story, which, as I hope, will sum up everything that has been written or spoken about the artist Anna Saryan.

Once, I had to leave for a far-away village on business. My company included a very famous playwright. He was unwilling to go and we had to listen to how annoyed he was all the way to our destination. When we arrived, he demonstrated his displeasure by turning his back at the rest of us and standing alone on the bank looking at the wide span of the lake. Having concluded our business we were about to go back to town and I called for our friend to join us in the car. To my surprise, he did not want to leave and kept on standing and looking at the lake. I approached him.

It was late October. The weather was amazingly nice and sunny. Almost all leaves had fallen and on the blue surface of the lake there was silently moving a dozen or two of white swans. The playwright turned to me his absolutely fascinated eyes and said only one word. That word was: “Naturprodukt”, meaning “one-hundred percent organic”.

Whether it was a habitual self-irony (that is lack of “fearlessness”) or some sort of awkwardly expressed yearning for everything natural, I do not know, because at that moment the following idea came to my mind. For hours our people are standing in front of supermarket shelves inquisitively studying the percentage of artificial colouring or conservatives in children’s cookies or soybean in sausages and wondering how ‘they’ managed to grow such bright tomatoes in winter. People want only natural, organic product for their body. But when it comes to food for mind or heart that is to art, their need for something natural, organic quite often diminishes or evaporates at all.

It was that story and my thoughts it evoked that I remembered examining Anna Saryan’s paintings. “Here it is, the Naturprodukt!” I thought. “There is nothing to fear about! No artificial colouring or conservatives. Here you can breathe at the full capacity of your lungs. It is organic.”