I started painting after the birth of my son. At 22 years old.
I graduated from night school at the Leningrad Academy of
Fine Arts. During my last years in the Soviet Union, I saw
escape as the only way of resistance to Evil, and it became
the dominating theme in my paintings of that period.
Little people, some times sad and some times funny,
came to my paintings in America.
They express nostalgia for my cruel motherland and
the difficulties of adjustment to my new home. They
also serve as "storytellers" in my works on Jewish
culture and history. Now living in San Francisco,
my escape has come almost a full circle:
there is only a bit of water between California and Sakhalin.
I was born on the Sachalin Island, in the Soviet Far East, and moved to Leningrad when I was eighteen years old.
After studying piano for ten years, I had to take up a job at a military plant dealing with hazardous materials,
at the time that was the only way for a girl from the
provinces to get a permit to live in Leningrad. I got married at nineteen and worked as a lathe
operator, black smith and a stoker.
When I was 21 years old, I came under the influence of the philosophy
of Rousseau and abandoned the city for Siberia, working
as a hunter in the taiga, I gradually turned into a dissident and came to Leningrad
to start a ten-year struggle for emigration.
