Artist Paul Tamanian Takes His Stand in Tallahassee
New gallery of abstract works may revolutionize city’s art scene

In Tallahassee, you just never know what lies around the corner. In this case, it is the emergence of something the Capital City has never had before. Something that just might thrust our leafy North Florida metropolis onto the major art world’s stage. And something brought to us by a “local boy” with the energy of a steamroller and creativity that has landed him at the top of the international arts market.
If you haven’t already, meet Paul Tamanian. He’s an artist to his calloused fingertips and a man whose mind and imaginative vision keep him bounding from a chair in his new Tallahassee gallery to point out different facets of his creations: a curve in the aluminum with which he works over to a monolithic abstract painting to delve into its creation.
“I just decided to give it a try—opening my own stand-alone gallery here in my ‘hometown’ city,” says Tamanian, now 70. And he has pulled out all the stops. In the evolving arts nexus of Midtown, just across the street from Midtown Reader, which itself plans to enlarge, Paul Tamanian has created a gallery of more than 3,000 square feet, brilliantly lit, with enough space for a viewer to step back and take in some of the dozens of works of art on display.
Here, contemporary aluminum panels, which some might compare to abstract impressionist Jackson Pollock’s “dripped” freedom technique, colorfully explode into what could be thunderous cascades, or constellations and volcanoes, cataracts or caverns, all brought to life by the imagination of the artist and transferred to viewers who sometimes stand like children, mesmerized by what they see.
There are Tamanian’s sculptures, flowing ribbons of foot-wide metal that seem to braid themselves loosely in coils and pouring from an organic source, then playfully perching on a wall or undulating gracefully in a corner. And then there are the surfboards. Yes, surfboards that Tamanian’s eye has given a new identity as objets d’art, and that painted and glazed, stand like pillars or masculine statements from ancient civilizations, or perhaps, simply the tangible memory of a great day at the beach.
Now, after 30 years within the sometimes cut-throat professional art world, the diminutive energy source known as Paul Tamanian has decided to invite new and old followers into his own vibrant gallery on Thomasville Road. Represented by some of the nation’s most prestigious art emporiums from San Francisco to Atlanta to New York and Miami, and working with collectors from around the world for decades, Tamanian has decided to “take a chance” on Tallahassee, believing that North Floridians are connoisseurs of fine art as much as a Manhattanite or the collector from Taiwan who once “bought the whole gallery of my work.”

Photo by Alicia Osborne
And just as Tamanian’s brilliant art pieces evolve from unexpected beginnings and materials, so, in a way, has Tamanian himself. “I was born in New York,” he says. “My grandfather was an Armenian immigrant, dirt poor, who raised my dad in the slums there. But after the war, my dad went to college on the G.I. Bill … and became a physicist. When he went to work for General Electric, we moved down to Clearwater where I was mostly raised.”
Young Paul filled his days with fishing and swimming, leading an active and what he calls “beach bum life” then. And art? “Not a part of my life,” he says. At least, not for a while. After a college go at accounting, which failed, he would go on to earn a degree in interior design from Florida State University. But that route, too, was not for him. “I spent seven years as a sporting goods store manager and another nine or 10 years working at Bill’s Art Supplies here in Tallahassee,” perhaps gestating the creativity that, at 40 years old, was getting ready to explode.
Then, “On a whim with a girlfriend, we decided we should take a pottery class at a local art center.” He smiles, just shaking his head. “The rest is kind of history.” Tamanian loved the feel of the clay, the stretching, the pounding, the things he could make appear. He says he destroyed lots of projects in kilns and through ignorance, but he was learning and most importantly, learning to experiment with each thing he made—like pouring melted automobile chrome over a clay vessel, then setting fire to the whole thing. Like a boy giggling, “I wonder if I could …” Tamanian was soon creating unique pieces that galleries began to sell.
“The next years were kind of ‘art isolation,’” he says. He added a barn and three kilns to the house he’d built himself. He quit his managerial job and devoted himself exclusively to making art and, more importantly, “hauling it across the country to art shows and eventually to the galleries that now had a demand for my work.”
Working without instruction or mentoring, Tamanian says he moved from heavy clay pieces to lighter, but often larger, sheets of aluminum. “I work outside, even now, because the products I use are so volatile and so physical.” Indeed, to see him work, pouring colored latex paints, sometimes automobile acrylic polyurethane or enamels, and firing the whole surface with a torch—only to go over the entire piece a second, third, or fifth time for the artistic expression he’s seeking—Tamanian looks like a foundry worker happily staked out in the woods.Of course, sometimes, when the muse has descended on an innocent artist, she just settles in and will not let go. “I have new ideas all the time,” says the restless Tamanian, who has now found photography “filled with possibilities.” But the commissions still keep coming. “The surfboards are collected by more people than you would imagine,” he says, gazing at a 10-foot-tall streamlined sculpture. And he’s just checked in on a collector who’s positioned two 16-foot metal pieces at the end of his dock. “I wanted to make sure they were secure when the hurricanes were coming close.”
But if there is any down time, what might the world-class creator and now gallery owner do with his non-committed hours? “Well, let me tell you,” he says, grinning, “there’s just got to be time reserved for golf. Yeah … I’m really good at it. Lots of other things just have to be worked around a good day for golf.” Until the muse taps him on the shoulder, of course, and tells him there’s a new idea on the way.