David Henry Yaghjian
David Henry Yaghjian
Born in Columbia, SC 1948, David Henry Yaghjian is the son of two painters, Dorothy Candy Yaghjian and Edmund K. Yaghjian.
While at Amherst College he studied with Fairfield Porter, Leonard Baskin, and Leonard DeLonga. At the Art Students League in NYC, he took classes with Will Barnet. He followed those studies with 5 years on a farm in Massachusetts with a group of “artists and assorted refugees” and 2 years in Vermont living with a friend and half a dozen goats.
In 1976 he moved to North Carolina where he painted, worked as laborer, a carpenter, a waiter.
In 1984 Yaghjian went back to Columbia, SC to work on a portrait commission and met Ellen Finley Emerson.
In 1985 Ellen got a position with Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta and they moved and lived there for 15 years. They were married in 1988 and had a daughter, Clare, in 1990.
In Atlanta, Frances Aronson, Fay Gold, McIntosh, and Right Brain art galleries represented Yaghjian. He also painted two large murals in that city.
In 2011 he spent time in Kaiserslautern, Germany as a participant in a cultural exchange and has worked on subsequent projects with those artists.
David Yaghjian was included in the 2012 book, “100 Southern Artists.”
His work was selected for the 2013, 2015, 2017and 2023 South Carolina Biennials.
In 2018, two of his paintings were hung in the American Embassy in Bern, Switzerland.
David Yaghjian has shown his art extensively throughout the Southeast, including at the Florence Museum of Art in Florence, SC, the South Carolina State Museum and McKissick Museum in Columbia, SC, the Greenville County Art Museum, Greenville, SC, and the Morris Museum in Augusta, Ga.
Paintings in the collections of the South Carolina State Museum, Columbia, SC, and the Greenville County Art Museum, Greenville , SC
Artwork for sale by contacting the artist
1 803 719 6641
paypal and venmo accepted
or through gallery
Mike Brown Contemporary
1-803-667-9990