Sirak Melkonian is a self-taught Iranian-Armenian artist, and a painter of abstract landscapes. At the age of fifteen, he participated in the group painting exhibition of the Armenian Cultural Association called "Mshakuyt" and then, in 1950, he attended the annual exhibition of the Iran-USSR Society, Tehran.
 
Melkonian worked closely with Marco Grigorian and got to know the art nouveau movement through the magazines and newspapers that Marco sent from Italy. He held his first solo exhibition in 1957 at the Estetic Gallery, Tehran. He received "The Imperial Court Prize" at the first Tehran Biennale and the "Special Award" at the "Contemporary Iranian Artists' Show" in the Iran-America Society. Since then, his works have been displayed alternately in group and individual exhibitions in Iran, America, Canada and Europe. In 1974, he founded the "Azad Group of Painters and Sculptors" with the cooperation of several modern painters and presented his works in domestic and foreign exhibitions of this group. One of the most important exhibitions of Melkonian was in Galerie Herve Odermatt in Paris.

In his early figurative paintings, Melkonian, used social issues, people's life and folk traditions in an expressionistic format as the basis of his works. In the course of his activity, the tendency towards abstraction became more colorful in his works, and the line became the main element. Traveling to the south of Iran as well as Sistan and Baluchistan and seeing the natural landscapes, caused a profound change in Melkonian's paintings. In a long period, the landscape became the main subject of his work. Creating regular networks of lines in a background with gray, black, brown, green and shell colors creates an abstract space, evoking Melkonian's perception of nature.

Alain Bousquet, French critic, writes about Melkonian and his works: "In every generation,you will find three to four painters like Sirak Melkonian, which attracts us at the first encounter. It encircles the serpent and perhaps disturbs us... The vast plains of his works, as if formed from clay, have the brilliant privilege of being unlike any landscape we know. These lands are not idealistic lands, but they are a kind of real inner lands, and no scale or sign can be given for them."