JIRAYR ZORTHIAN & RANCH HISTORY

 

With its handmade stone walls perched on a mountaintop in Angeles National Forest, Zorthian Ranch is a cross between Topanga Canyon and ancient Rome. For over 75 years, it was a haven for artists and intellectuals, housing an Open-Air Museum, rare Art Collection, Cultural Arts Center, classes in Art, Regenerative Building and gardening, Airbnbs, unique architecture, salt-water pool, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, and lovely gardens. Fifteen miles from downtown Los Angeles, the forty-two-acre ranch is worlds away from the city. Historical buildings (early 1900s barns, Mid-Century Modern home, Adobe Villa) made a convenient and versatile film location spot, with many TV shows, films, and music videos having been shot there.

 

 

The ranch’s history is rich, and Jirayr Zorthian’s magnetism is legendary—attracting luminaries Bob Dylan, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, jazz great Charlie Parker, writer William Saroyan, futurist Buckminster Fuller, aeronautical engineer Paul MacCready, guitarist Andrés Segovia, pop artist Andy Warhol, musician Tom Petty and more. Zorthian’s influence was vast as he inspired others to action. After spending a night riding horses and swimming in the pool on the mountaintop with Jirayr, Charlie Parker thanked him by giving a historic jam session at the ranch, which LA WEEKLY reported was “The Wildest Party in LA History.” When Richard Feynman won a Nobel Prize, he said the art lessons he received from Jirayr had taught him the importance of experimentation in his scientific work.

 

 

Jirayr Zorthian (1911-2004) was an Armenian Genocide survivor who came to America at age eleven. A gifted artist from a young age, he was inspired by Michelangelo and Da Vinci as a young man. They were Renaissance Artists: painters, sculptors and architects who weren’t confined to one pursuit. Jirayr strove to be broadly artistic like them. After being granted a full scholarship to Yale University and a Winchester Fellowship to study in Europe for 18 months, he received national recognition, painting forty-two murals across the country (11 in the Tennessee State Capitol). His magnificent assemblages, sculptures, pencil drawings, paintings, and architecture were on view at the ranch.

 

 

In 1946, Jiyayr and his first wife bought a parcel of what grew to become Zorthian Ranch. "My father said, 'What a beautiful country, how abundant, but how much they waste.’” Sharing his father's view of American wastefulness, Jirayr used repurposed materials: buildings were made from sources including redwood from demolished Craftsman homes and discarded telephone poles. Steps were made out of old railroad ties, and windows donated from a train were decorated with telephone insulators. As architectural features were torn out of older buildings in the area, Jirayr repurposed them into his structures. Discarded columns, cast iron, broken concrete, spare parts, and relics were all used. Zorthian turned waste into art, and his land into a historical, cultural and agricultural learning center. He called it “The Center for Research & Development of Industrial Discards With Emphasis on Aesthetics.”

                                                                 

 

Zorthian had an indomitable spirit—appearing on Groucho Marx's TV show, You Bet Your Life in 1960, teaching art at Chouinard Art School and Pasadena City College, spending six months in 1966 on commission in Vietnam, creating paintings for the US Navy, conducting demonstrations at the LA County Fair, serving on the Cultural Affairs Committee of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce and as a trustee for the Pasadena Art Museum. He danced at a 1975 opera ball honoring Beverly Sills—where he stood on his head, threw his wife over his hip, and later balanced a glass of water on his head while jitterbugging.