Apparently, he’s just got off the phone with a telemarketer who was thrown by the “u” in “Eduard” and completely lost by the time she attempted “Manukyan.”

When he pulls me in for a hug, I’m surprised by my height advantage. As a kid, on holidays and special occasions, I was deeply intimidated by my uncle, who immigrated here when I was three, and who would buzz around the house with an electric razor at his throat, shouting words I didn’t understand. He once painted a baseball player for my bedroom wall, but because neither of us can speak more than a few words of the other’s language, I know almost nothing about him.

Shorter or not, he still brims with intimidating strength. He’s almost 70 and remains in great physical shape—his grip during our handshake is as firm as ever, and the hairline of his white flattop hasn’t receded much at all—but that’s not what I mean. The strength I’m talking about has something to do with his eyes, which seem capable of paying a supremely lasting degree of attention. Whenever he looks elsewhere, at a painting or at my cousin, my own eyes instinctively follow. For this reason, I can’t picture him looking away. Even now, when I imagine him, he looks directly at me.

“Come,” he says, and leads me to a painting near the entrance of his studio. It’s a self-portrait in which his image breaks through the canvas from the other side, paintbrush like a hammer in his fist. The tattered canvas-within-a-canvas depicts the famous works of modern masters, including Matisse, Picasso, Miró, and Chagall.

Chris McCormick

“I wanted to say,” he explains, “to hell with having only one genre, to hell with only surrealism or only realism. Just as people have changing moods or contradictory feelings, an artist should be able to work in multiple styles.”

There’s no denying that his work lives up to his philosophy. As he takes me on a tour of the studio, I see charcoal sketches and lush dreamscapes and realistic landscapes and abstract portraits and polemical paintings about the genocide.

“And yet,” he says, “no matter how different one painting is from another, people can always tell that it’s mine.”

Identifiable, yet adaptive: In a way, I think, there’s nothing more essentially Armenian than the artwork of Eduard Manukyan.

* * *

Although Armenians from Armenia, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, and elsewhere have been immigrating to cities like New York, Boston, Fresno, and Los Angeles since the genocide of 1915 and even earlier, it wasn’t until the late 1970s that a dramatic influx of Armenians turned Glendale into the capital of the diaspora. The Lebanese civil war, along with the Islamic revolution in Iran, sent Armenians abroad in droves. My uncle arrived among a more recent wave of immigrants. After the devastating Spitak earthquake in 1988, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and with national autonomy on the horizon, bleak economic prospects sent thousands of Armenians—my uncle and his family included—Glendale bound.