Shimon Okshteyn: Dreaming Of My City, 1982

In “Dreaming Of My City” watercolors the artist created  imaginative reconstructions of his native Ukrainian city, rendering the city once deeply familiar unfamiliar, moving away and floating freely in space.

“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