Melted Snow, 48” x 24”
The Liberation of Leon Oks
W
hen Leon Oks was a young boy, he already knew in a childish, formless way what excited him and gave him a feeling of intense joy and pleasure. Not yet old enough to really understand, he looked at the world around him and was captivated in a way that he vividly remembers but finds hard to describe. The colors, the compositions of nature’s beauty, the faces on bodies, the light and the dark, all touched him and he knew even then that his passion for creating art was implanted. Born in the Ukrainian city of Zhitomir in the former Soviet Union, in 1941, when he was two years old, his father was drafted into the army and was soon killed in the line of duty. His surviving family consisting of himself, two siblings, mother, and grandparents was uprooted from their tiny, oneroom home in Zhitomir and forced to flee over and over again to safer villages, not yet occupied by the Germans. They endured constant instability and frustration in a dreadful, hopeless World War II environment. In 1945, after the war, the family was able to return to Zhitomir. It was during those postwar years (when he was six) that he began to draw and paint at night in the kitchen when the family was asleep. As he grew and matured, his need to create art became inevitability. Without instruction, he started copying the Masters from the small collection of art books in his home as well as from the paintings hanging in the local art museum. These were his first instructors as well as his mentors who taught him much in their brilliant silence. He was also drawn to create studies from nature and spent many days walking through the nearby woods observing the awesome beauty and grandeur that surrounded him. His sensitivity to color, was developed quickly against this backdrop. These self-taught experiences served as a foundation which carried him into 24 • Fine Art Magazine • Spring 2009
rigorous and disciplined formal training at the School of Fine Arts. At that time, the focus of Soviet culture was to manipulate visual political slogans, offensive and distasteful to Oks, but pleasing to the government. His first exhibition of portraits, landscapes, and what later came to be labeled as “imaginary expressionism” was quickly censured, and more than half of the paintings were removed before the public was allowed in for viewing.
Jealousy I, 36” x 30”