alexander

I always dreamt of becoming a celebrated artist, but habitually forgot to sign my pieces. Living like many Soviet artists—on a modest salary and in a cramped space—I often stored my work in precarious locations: outdoor garages, friends' studios and damp basements. Not surprisinbly, much of my early work was appropriated by anonymous art aficionados. That is how I became a populist artist instead of a popular one.

I have been doing art since age nine, when in 1931 I moved with my family from one of Ukraine 's provincial towns into its southern seaside capital of Odessa . At times interrupted, at times inspired by hunger, war and political lunacies, my art thrived, as did I, on the dusty slopes of my beloved city. It is this city—with its obscene beaches, exhausted skies, rude bazaars, blanched alleyways, and wholesome sun-baked people—that taught me to paint. Being the Last of the Mohegans within the South-Russian school of painting, I have been following a tradition of depicting impressions of light—impressions that it left on me and life around me. It is of course Odessa 's elusive sun that set me searching (for better or for worse) for light—in all its multitude of incessantly capricious moods.

To see some of my early pieces, please click on early works

My search has continued in Boston , where, together with my wife and daughter, I came in 1994. It has been a difficult transition, perhaps more difficult than I could have ever imagined. The pompous azure with its palatial clouds replaced the cozy faded skies of my childhood. Everything—from the bold granite to the heavy Atlantic and the shameless golds of a New England autumn—shocked me with its frankness (what at first seemed like vulgarity) of color. I had to find new palettes, new strokes, new techniques. I had to fall in love anew. And that I did. Over the past decade I have been painting tirelessly in and around Boston , discovering new light, new color and an altogether new painter inside.

Too see my work, click on the gallery link above

For many years, I have also been leaving footprints aside from the multiple paintings committed tomuseum and private collections across the world. I have been teaching—first for four decades at the Odessa College of Stage Art and Design and later privately—to children and adults. I teach and I learn, I learn and I teach with pleasure, knowing that unaccomplished is the artist whose art dies with him and worthless is that teacher whose students do not outdo him.