NEW YORK, NY - Galust Orduyan 48. is an entrepreneur and artist, and a recent immigrant to the US determined to make it on his own, without the public and private assistance that many arriving from the former Soviet Union take for granted. In fact, his family may he seen as one entrepreneurial unit, marketing its considerable artistic talent for the good of the whole. Mr. Orduyan's daughter is a music teacher and composer. His son is an animator, illustrator and artist, who collaborates on occasion with his father.

Mr. Orduyan's bowls, plates, wall art, and facades are created from multicolored glass and ceramic shards (no two adjacent pieces identical in color or shape) that the artist shapes painstakingly into works of movement, color, and light. One piece, at first glance a static, child's depiction of flaming sun, becomes upon closer examination whirling fireball, its white-hot center ringed by cooler yellow dancing on tongues of warm oranges and reds across a star-filled, blue and black cosmos. In another piece, a sweeping horizontal expanse tills with waves of yellow, blue, red, and lustrous purple barreling down upon a lone classical column, the only "structure" in the piece, which stands amidst the maelstrom crashing toward, over and, finally. beyond it.

Mr. Orduyan shows regularly at Gregory's Chateau Hip, a Manhattan art gallery, and his work can be seen adorning several New York City commercial establishments. One recently finished piece, commissioned by Turkish Cuisine, a restaurant on Ninth Avenue at 44th Street, is a rich mosaic of deep reds, blues, and yellows, a porcelain tapestry purposely reminiscent of Caucasian carpet work both in overall appearance and specific design. Dancing dervishes and courting swans, flowers, and wine glasses embellish the piece, which hangs above the entrance to the entrance to the restaurant.

It speaks, says Galust, ''the language of the carpet, the language of hospitality." The artist's pieces can also be seen decorating the interior of Paradise Muffin, located at Eighth Avenue and 17th Street.

As the former director of the Children's Art Studios of the Professional Union system in Moscow (a web of thousands of government-run art classes), Mr. Orduyan was in a good position to observe Soviet methods of controlling and stifling creativity. Disagreements with the "anti-democratic and anti-learning mentality" of the State, especially with regard to its children, led him to join and eventually head an illegal organization of artists and other intelligentsia dedicated to freedom of thought and expression.

Although his philosophy of art has been shaped by everything from a background in aeronautical engineering to investigations into the nature of religion, Mr. Orduyan credits the perspectives of and questions from, the thousands of children he has taught with shaping his understanding of his own craft and its innumerable possibilities.

Fleeing the Turks in 1915, Mr. Orduyan's family left its Nakhichevan home and fled northward across the Caucasus. And so he was born, in Viadikavkaz, Russia, a child of the Diaspora, in 1946. Mr. Orduyan's art, assembled as it is from countless dishes (symbols of the hearth and home) smashed for art's high purpose, is a metaphor, perhaps, for the many refugee lives, Armenian and other, shattered seemingly beyond repair, only to be re-formed by hard work and faith into new wholes, triumphant and more brilliant than ever.
Information on Mr. Orduyan's upcoming showings can be obtained by calling Gregory's Chateau Hip, 110 Greene Street, at (212)941-8080. Galust Orduyan himself may be reached by calling (212)647-9822.