Shimon Okshteyn: Color of My City, 1982

One of the first oil paintings the artist created upon his arrival to the United States from Ukraine in 1980 depicting his native city of Chernivtsi floating in space, viewing it from afar with an immense sensation of newly found freedom.

“Rigorously trained in the art institutes of the Soviet Union, Okshteyn had acquired before coming to the United States a great mastery of the techniques of drawing, composition and painting. …His first few years in America are represented in his work by brief but rapid period of transition, which appears to have ended in 1983, when he began to depict some of these women whom I might be tempted to call, according to an old American popular song, his “Hard-hearted Hannahs”.” ____ Edouard Roditi, Los Angeles