Tak Salmastyan (b. 1963) is an Armenian American artist, educator, and author based in Los Angeles. Born in Armenia’s Lori province, he studied at the Stepan Aghajanyan Fine Arts School and earned a Master of Arts from Yerevan State University in 1989 before continuing graduate studies in education and business in the United States.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including ArtExpo New York and Gallery 825 in Los Angeles, as well as in Tokyo, Berlin, Palma, Granada, Zug, and Dubai. He is the creator of Autoplasticism and BinArtism™, artistic approaches that explore the relationship between technology, memory, and human emotion.
Salmastyan has taught art and animation throughout Southern California and has received honors including Best Animation and Best Director at the LA Art-House Film Festival and the People’s Telly Award. He is the author of The Life’s Theater essay series and the novel The Accelerates: Forty Days to Dust, and is currently completing an epic fantasy trilogy beginning with The Glove: A Currency of Memory, a mythic saga exploring power, memory, and the fragile balance between creation and destruction.
MANIFESTO
I am the King of Spiritual Hooligans without borders or limitation, a dreaming voyager celebrating love, misery, light, and darkness of the universe through vivid imagination, spurious style, and striking color. No doctrine confines me. Not realist, not surrealist, not socialist, not cubist, not capitalist, not impressionist, not modernist, not conformist. Only Artist.
“A riveting post-apocalyptic tale with a memorable cast.”
– Kirkus Reviews
SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY
THE ACCELERATES։ FORTY DAYS TO DUST
BY Tak Salmastyan • POSTED ON July 28, 2025
Siblings struggle to survive a global virus that aggressively targets children in this speculative-fiction debut.
GeneCorp saves Ethan Mercer’s 9-month-old brother, Leo, from an illness. But the American-based company’s injection has done much more—Leo’s limbs stretch, his skin thickens, and his face takes on an “almost ethereal quality.” When he turns 1, his body resembles a 5-year-old’s. Shortly thereafter, other children are infected in the same way once an airborne virus apparently goes worldwide. The kids, dubbed Accelerates, violently and fatally attack others, even adults. But Leo’s the exception, convincing the 14-year-old Ethan that the ostensibly helpful military will want his baby brother for tests. The siblings hide from everyone until they meet Clara Davtian and her slingshot-toting little sister, Mia. While Clara fears a run-in with her violent Accelerate baby, Ava, the new mother is herself infected, though she experiences no bodily changes or aggressive tendencies. The group’s potential salvation is a GeneCorp facility, but Ethan and the others will have to get there somehow. And does the company even have a cure for the virus? Salmastyan’s concise prose aids in setting a brisk pace—dishing out an engaging backstory and putting the brothers in immediate peril. Narrative descriptions likewise establish an unnerving mood; searching for food stirs up assorted odors when preserved fruit’s “sickly-sweet scent” clashes with “the metallic tang of rust and the musty rot of soaked pages” of books nearby. The main characters will rope readers in with their fierce loyalty (Clara never forgets that Ava, who’s an indisputable menace, is her daughter) and their resilience as they trek a land rife with dangers. Scenes do, on occasion, become repetitive. Characters often question whether those infected are “monsters,” and the myriad encounters with Accelerates don’t offer much variety, with the same tactic repeatedly used against them. Still, the gripping novel ends strongly.
A riveting post-apocalyptic tale with a memorable cast.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
ADDITIONAL WORKS AVAILABLE
The Brothers: A Covenant of Balance
Long before kingdoms rose, a curse divided power into two relics that could either enrich the world or burn it away. When the Glove and the Twin move toward reunion, the fate of memory and destruction will depend on whether a human hand can carry both without breaking the world.
Long before the Kingdom of Loriena rose in stone, power came to a king as both blessing and curse.
Sadimos, ruler of the early tribes, was granted hands that could reshape the world. With his right hand he turned matter into gold. With his left he reduced life to ash. What began as divine favor soon devoured his own house. Sons became statues. Others vanished into dust. Love itself turned dangerous beneath his touch.
Only his daughter Tahvshuhi dared confront the curse. Guided by a vision of Aramazd, she reshaped the power that had destroyed their family. From the skin of Sadimos’s hands she forged two vessels of restraint: the Glove, which enriches with judgment, and the Twin, which destroys only with intention.
But balance does not survive temptation.
When Prince Gurgum steals the darker relic and carries it into the Black Ice Mountains, the separation that preserved the world is broken. The Twin awakens and begins to reshape memory, law, and power across kingdoms.
Centuries later, the consequences converge.
Knight Razmik Gevid, Crown Princess Sibylla, and their companions travel toward the Northeast where the Twin’s shadow gathers strength. There they must confront not only an enemy, but the truth hidden within the relics themselves.
The Glove and the Twin were never meant to rule the world separately.
They were meant to recognize the one who can carry both.
And when the brothers finally meet again, the fate of memory, destruction, and balance will pass into human hands.
The Glove: A Currency of Memory
In the Kingdom of Loriena, sorrow can be surrendered to an ancient relic that turns grief into gold. When signs appear that its forgotten counterpart has awakened in the Northeast, a young inventor and a storm-listening princess discover that memory itself may be the kingdom’s most dangerous currency.
In the Kingdom of Loriena, grief can be transformed into gold.
At the center of the capital city of Aramus rests the Glove, an ancient relic capable of turning human sorrow into the kingdom’s currency. For centuries, citizens have offered their memories, regrets, and broken dreams to its silent touch, sustaining a fragile prosperity built on loss.
But the Glove has a forgotten counterpart.
Far to the northeast lies the Twin, a relic rumored not to preserve memory but to erase it entirely.
When the king vanished years earlier searching for the Twin, the kingdom was left suspended between legend and fear. Now strange signs signal that both relics may be awakening.
A young inventor haunted by his father’s disappearance, a princess who hears storms like prophecy, and a prince quietly plotting treason find their destinies drawn together as the balance between memory and oblivion begins to collapse.
Because when the Glove moves, history does not repeat itself.
It remembers.
The Life’s Theater: Composed in Silk. Book Two. Art and Essays
In a world that rewards noise and performance, some lives are shaped in silence. The Life’s Theater: Composed in Silk explores the quiet strength of women who transform restraint, memory, and emotional depth into a language of grace.
In the second volume of The Life’s Theater, Tak Salmastyan explores the quiet architecture of grace, identity, and emotional awakening. Through a series of portraits, essays, and paintings, the book reflects on the inner lives of women who carry strength through stillness, restraint, fire, and quiet resilience.
Structured in four acts that move from discipline to awakening and finally toward reflective calm, Composed in Silk examines how silence, memory, love, and solitude shape the human spirit. Text and image stand together as parallel voices, offering a contemplative meditation on presence, dignity, and the fragile courage required to remain open in a restless world.
Published: Nov. 6, 2025
ISBN: 978-1969208089
The Life’s Theater: Echoes That Suffocate. Book One. Art and Essays
We enter life already cast in roles we did not choose, performing scripts written by family, society, and history. The Life’s Theater: Echoes That Suffocate explores what happens when the performance begins to fracture and the quiet voice beneath the mask finally demands to be heard.
Through a sequence of essays paired with expressive paintings, Tak Salmastyan explores the quiet forces that shape human identity long before we recognize the roles we are playing. The Life’s Theater: Echoes That Suffocate moves through obedience, fracture, awakening, and renewal, tracing how social pressure, political systems, and personal memory slowly reshape the self.
From the suffocating rituals of ideological conformity to moments of artistic and spiritual awakening, each reflection examines the tension between the roles we perform and the voice that resists them. The paintings and texts stand as parallel witnesses to the same inner struggle.
What emerges is a meditation on identity, conscience, and the courage required to step beyond the script of expectation.
Published: July 16, 2025
ISBN: 979-8292557654
The Life’s Theater: The Places That Carried Us. Book Four. Art and Essays
The places we remember are never only geography. In The Life’s Theater: The Places That Carried Us, rooms, orchards, cities, oceans, and mountains become witnesses to the bonds, crossings, and quiet devotions that shape a human life.
In the fourth volume of The Life’s Theater, Tak Salmastyan reflects on the landscapes that quietly shape identity and belonging. Through essays paired with paintings created across decades, the book traces a journey from childhood in the mountains of Armenia to migration, work, and renewal in American cities.
Each place carries a fragment of memory: a shared childhood room, an orchard where family bonds first formed, the ocean crossed in search of liberty, and the cities that demanded endurance and discipline. Moving through exile, devotion, and return, The Places That Carried Us reveals how the places we inhabit become the silent architecture of who we are.
Published: Feb. 27, 2026
ISBN: 978-1969208140
The Life’s Theater: The Quiet Architecture of Love. Book Three. Art and Essays
Love rarely announces itself in grand gestures. The Life’s Theater: The Quiet Architecture of Love explores how intimacy is built slowly through attention, presence, and the quiet courage to remain with another life as both tenderness and vulnerability deepen.
In the third volume of The Life’s Theater, Tak Salmastyan explores love not as spectacle but as quiet practice. Through a sequence of essays paired with expressive paintings, the book traces the unfolding of intimacy from first recognition to commitment, vulnerability, and witness.
Structured in four movements, the work reflects on how connection grows through attention, patience, and the courage to remain present when certainty fades. Alongside these reflections, Salmastyan introduces BinArtism™, a visual language built from the binary symbols “0” and “1,” suggesting that even within systems of logic, patterns of human feeling can emerge.
The result is a contemplative meditation on love, presence, and endurance.
Published: Dec. 30, 2025
ISBN: 978-1969208119
The Twin: A Debt of Light
The Glove falls silent while its darker sibling begins to stir beyond the Black Ice Mountains. As memory fractures across kingdoms and enemies gather in the shadows, those sworn to protect the balance must face a war that feeds not on conquest but on confusion.
The Kingdom of Loriena survives the storm at Maxaneng’s Castle, yet survival brings no celebration. The bells toll for the dead, the city of Aramus moves with cautious breath, and beneath the Central Plaza of the Unseen the ancient relic known as the Glove grows silent.
For centuries the Glove guarded the balance of memory. Now it refuses to answer.
Far to the Northeast, in the frozen darkness where black ice never melts, its lost counterpart begins to stir. The Twin reaches across kingdoms, bending memory, confusing borders, and drawing strange creatures from the fractures of forgotten histories. Villages fall into quiet confusion. Soldiers begin to doubt their own memories. The world itself seems to hesitate.
Knight Razmik Gevid feels the call first. The Medallion at his chest answers a distant pulse that the Glove refuses to acknowledge. Crown Princess Sibylla senses the same disturbance moving through wind, stone, and dream.
Beyond Loriena’s borders, Prince Varazkhan and the pirate king Mad Jack Ghangramorus gather power among kingdoms already shaken by fear and rumor.
What begins is not a war of armies.
It is a war for memory itself.
Between the silent patience of the Glove and the desperate longing of the Twin, the world stands at a fragile threshold. If reunion comes through force, memory may not survive it.
And if the Glove continues to refuse its answer, the silence may reshape the fate of every kingdom.
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