A former engineer turns her inner reflections into experimental works of art
By Patrick L. Kennedy
Whether it’s beet juice and onion peels on scraps of burlap and newspapers, or oils and acrylics on traditional canvas, Sirarpi Heghinian-Walzer (ENG’79,’82) uses whatever materials she thinks will work to make abstract expressionist art that speaks to the viewer.
“I use a lot of things that people might think are garbage,” she says. “That’s why I call it mixed media—it’s whatever’s within
my reach.”
If something doesn’t work, she’ll paint over it and try again. She iterates, like the engineer she once was. But now, instead of designing mammogram machines and pacemakers, she is making art meant to convey universal emotions.
“I guess I’ve always been thinking out of both sides of the brain,” she says.
Many layers
Sirarpi Heghinian grew up in Aleppo, Syria, where her Armenian grandparents had fled from Turkey. She learned to speak Arabic as well as Armenian and Turkish, and took one year of English at a high-end private school—where her father was a chef—before immigrating to the United States at age 13 with her family, settling in Watertown, Massachusetts.
A gifted student, Heghinian skipped two grades and graduated from Watertown High School at 15. She enrolled at Boston University at 16, following in the footsteps of her sister, Sylva Heghinian Collins (GRS’77). Sirarpi began her BU studies as a premed major; despite teenage dabbling in graphic design, she didn’t consider art as a potential career. “Medicine was always the direction I was going in,” she says.
But when her mother fell ill with cancer, frequent visits to the hospital convinced Heghinian that a medical career was not for her, and she switched her major to biomedical engineering.
After graduation, Heghinian landed a job in the electro-optics department at Honeywell, where she designed mammogram technology. “I liked the challenge of solving complicated problems,” she says.
A different kind of complication arose when her work took her to the Middle East, where Heghinian wound up installing electro-optics systems on military tanks. “It was an experience I’ll never forget—good and bad,” she says. “As a biomedical engineer, I wanted to do some good in the world, and now I was working on tanks. It turned me off a bit.”
A new stage
She returned to engineering for medical applications when, now as Heghinian-Walzer, she moved with her then-husband to 1980s West Berlin, where she designed pacemakers for the German firm Biotronik.
It was in Berlin that Heghinian-Walzer began taking art classes, eventually earning a BFA from Berlin’s Academy for the Fine Arts. “Basically, I needed to express myself differently,” she says. “I needed to voice my feelings, and this was my language now.” She began working on landscapes because she was chafing in West Berlin, an urban enclave largely cut off from the world at the time. “I noticed I was really missing places like Walden Pond,” she says.
This was when, while in the kitchen keeping an eye on her kids, Heghinian-Walzer started grabbing beet juice, old homework, faded magazines, and other unorthodox materials to create her art. She likes to experiment, adding layer upon layer to her collages. “When do you stop is always the challenge,” she says.
Repent, repaint, repeat
Heghinian-Walzer returned to the US in 2000, settling in Lexington, Massachusetts, with a new partner. While consulting for small businesses on web development, branding, and marketing, she continued learning and making art, eventually exhibiting and selling her work. Her paintings and collages have been exhibited at Cove Gallery in Wellfleet, 51 Walden Gallery in Concord, and other respected venues.
The style that Heghinian-Walzer has developed leans heavily into the concept of “pentimento.” From the Italian word for repentance, in art it refers to the act of changing one’s mind, of painting a new layer atop a mistake and trying anew. To Heghinian-Walzer, those visible layers of materials can represent the layers of a life. “Loss and memory are very strong in my work,” she says.
For example, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, news of residents losing their homes and fleeing the traumatic experience gave Heghinian-Walzer flashbacks to the grim stories her father told about the atrocities committed by Turkish soldiers during the Armenian Genocide of 1915, which forced her family to take refuge in Syria. The resulting painting, Memory of New Orleans, of a white silhouette turning away from a turquoise flood, showed “the feeling of leaving everything behind,” she told an arts journalist.
Fittingly, in 2015 Heghinian-Walzer had a solo exhibition at the Armenian Museum of America in Watertown. She also founded and directs Art Without Borders, a nonprofit that seeks to protect artist rights and promote art’s power to create mutual respect among diverse cultures. “Through nonprofits and art, I’m being heard,” she says.
While some of her works evoke sadness with clusters of dark fragments, others depict wide-open, light-filled spaces, like beaches or meadows. “The landscapes are another way of healing,” Heghinian-Walzer says.
In some cases, her works contain both solitude and beauty. As a child in Syria, she was once caught in a sandstorm while walking home from school. “That feeling of being lost in the sand stayed with me.” Fast-forward to last November, when Heghinian-Walzer and a friend enjoyed an unseasonably warm day swimming off Singing Beach in Manchester-by-the-Sea. “There was a warm fog, and it was beautiful, but I thought if I swam out too far, nobody would see me. I wasn’t afraid, but it brought back the childhood memory of the sandstorm. Enough to make me say, ‘I have to put this on canvas.’”
This article originally appeared in the spring 2025 issue of ENGineer magazine.