Olga Volchkova | |
---|---|
Website | olgalaxy |
Olga Volchkova is a Russian-born artist currently resident in Eugene, Oregon. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Volchkova was born in Tver, Russia, in 1970, in the former Soviet Union. Many of her relatives were collectivized subsistence farmers living in villages outside of the city, and across the seasons she would leave the city to farm, garden, and forage for berries and mushrooms with them. [6] She developed a sympathy with nature that would influence her later art. As a child she went to math school, and studied piano for eight years in music school.
As an adult in Tver she studied chemistry and art, taking degrees in art restoration and Icon painting. The Grabar Institute certified her as a second-degree Oil Painting restorer. [7] [8] She worked as a conservator and curator in the Tver Oblast Art Gallery, and joined a journeyman team of important early post-Soviet iconostasis painters and restorers. [9] Since she played a role in the Icon revival, her secular work could be considered a branch of that tradition. [10] [2]
In 1998, she moved to the United States, where she worked as an all-around art restorer in Manhattan. In 1999, she moved to downtown Palo Alto, California, where she found herself in the heart of the first Dotcom boom. She became artistic director for Workspot, a now defunct start-up and contracting house near University Avenue in Palo Alto. There she pioneered the commercial use of scanned watercolors in webpage design, a laborious approach that won her no imitators, but many admirers—Workspot took the 2000 Linux Journal award for Best Web Solution. [11] [12]
In 2000 she moved to Eugene, Oregon. She studied ceramics and figure sculpture at the University of Oregon, and her work became a small sensation in Eugene's wood-fired ceramics movement. [13] [14] She became involved in concluding work in a research project initiated by architect Christopher Alexander. [15] In 2002 she began to study at the world-renowned Pilchuck Glass School, where she discovered cast glass. One of her first pieces was selected as the only cast glass work for Pilchuck's live auction, Passion Afire, of emerging glass artists, held at the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Within a year, Pilchuck also selected her work for their annual live auction, in the company of some of the world's most famous glass artists. [16] [17]
In 2003, she co-founded a non-profit dance institute, The Tango Center, [18] and became its art director. She managed the hall's interior design and construction, but also sang Russian Tangos with the house band, and improvised Argentine Tango, the dance, with various partners in front of live audiences. [19] [20]
In 2005 Volchkova left the US to adjust her immigration status. In the atmosphere of the Bush administration, the adjustment was repeatedly delayed and denied, making for a total of five years in exile. [3] She spent time painting in India, where she became inspired by colors that contrasted with the grey landscape of Moscow. In 2010, on her eighth try, she was granted residency, and returned to Oregon. [5] On her return, she worked as a gardener, reuniting her with her lifelong love of plants, and inspiring her botanical artwork. She again became involved in community projects. [21]
In 2013 she appeared on the cover of Crime & the City Solution's album American Twilight . [22] She also played the central figure in music videos released by Mute Records for the album, [23] [24] created by Danielle de Picciotto.
Her latest major series of paintings, original icons known as the 'Garden Saints', [25] [26] were part of two Art exhibitions in Berlin, and two in Hamburg, in 2012 and 2013. [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] These are based on her experience as a gardener, landscape designer, and farmer, and inspired by research on the history of human-plant interaction. [38] [39] [40]
The icon series includes over a hundred plant canonizations, nineteen of which were exhibited from 2015 to 2016 at the University of Oregon's Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] In 2016, the "Rose and Chocolate" Icon from this series became the album cover of "Unity" from the Potomak label of Einstürzende Neubauten. [47] [48] [49]
Art publisher Pomegranate released notecards of the Garden Saints, and a calendar in 2018. [50] [51] Volchkova occasionally teaches Icon painting at the University of Oregon's Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, [52] and she is the topic of research projects. [53] [54]
A public television segment on her work [55] was nominated for a 2016 Emmy award. [56] [57]
In 2022 she exhibited at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University. [58] [59] [60]
In 2023 two of her icons were included in a history of art and plants, published in four languages by Taschen books, entitled 'Plant Magick'. [61] [62]
In 2023-24 she has a solo exhibition at The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis. [63]
Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova was a Russian-Soviet avant-garde artist, painter and designer.
Morris Cole Graves was an American painter. He was one of the earliest Modern artists from the Pacific Northwest to achieve national and international acclaim. His style, referred to by some reviewers as Mysticism, used the muted tones of the Northwest environment, Asian aesthetics and philosophy, and a personal iconography of birds, flowers, chalices, and other images to explore the nature of consciousness.
Pilchuck Glass School is an international center for glass art education. The school was founded in 1971 by Dale Chihuly, Ruth Tamura, Anne Gould Hauberg (1917-2016), and John H. Hauberg (1916-2002). The campus is located on a former tree farm in Stanwood, Washington in the United States. The administrative offices are located in Seattle. The name "Pilchuck" comes from the local Native American language and translates to "red water" in reference to the Pilchuck River. Pilchuck offers one, two, or three week resident classes each summer in a broad spectrum of glass techniques as well as residencies for emerging and established artists working in all media.
Ginny Ruffner is a pioneering American glass artist based in Seattle, Washington. She is known for her use of the lampworking technique and for her use of borosilicate glass in her painted glass sculptures.
Tom Cramer is an American artist working in Portland, Oregon noted for his intricately carved and painted wood reliefs and ubiquity throughout the city of Portland. Often called the unofficial Artist Laureate of Portland, Cramer is one of the most visible and successful artists in the city. The influences on his work are both organic and technological. He is widely collected and is in many prominent west coast museum and private collections. He is in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum in Portland Oregon, the Halle Ford Museum in Salem Oregon, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum in Eugene, Oregon, the Boise Art Museum in Idaho.
Jeff Ballard is an American glass artist.
Irina Ivanovna Getmanskaya is a Soviet, Russians painter and art teacher, living and working in Saint Petersburg, a member of the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists, regarded as a representative of the Leningrad school of painting.
Yuri Mikhailovich Shablikin was a Soviet, Russian realist painter, graphic artist, restorer, art teacher, who live and work in Saint Petersburg, a member of the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists, regarded by art historian Sergei V. Ivanov as one of representatives of the Leningrad school of painting.
Arlene Schnitzer was an American arts patron and philanthropist. She was the founder and director of the Fountain Gallery, established in Portland to showcase artists in the Pacific Northwest. She is the namesake of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, a performing arts center in Portland, Oregon.
Ann Gardner is an American glass artist known for her large-scale sculptural and architectural installations.
Debora Moore is a contemporary glass artist. She is best known for her glass orchids.
Cynthia Lahti is an American contemporary artist from Portland, Oregon, who works in many mediums: "from collage to ceramics, altered books, and painting".
LaVerne Erickson Krause (1924–1987) was an American artist. She founded the University of Oregon printmaking program and taught there for twenty years, creating more than ten thousand paintings and prints in her lifetime. An advocate for artists' economic and working conditions, she was instrumental in founding the Oregon chapter of the Artists Equity Association and served as president of the national Artists Equity. She is "recognized for her outstanding contributions as an educator, studio artist, and arts activist".
Eunice Lulu Parsons, also known as Eunice Jensen Parsons, is an American modernist artist known for her collages. Parsons was born in Loma, Colorado, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Portland Museum Art School, where she also worked as a teacher for over 20 years.
Amanda Viola Snyder, née Tester, was a contemporary American artist from Portland, Oregon. She produced hundreds of drawings, paintings and woodcuts, and held 32 solo exhibitions.
Mary Kirkwood was an American artist and a professor at the University of Idaho from 1930 to 1970. Kirkwood earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana, and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, and completed graduate work at the Royal Art School in Stockholm, Sweden and the College of Art Study Abroad in Paris. The same year, she began teaching at the University of Idaho as a professor of painting and history of painting, and remained with the university for 40 years, until retiring in 1970.
Anne Kutka, aka Anne Kutka McCosh was a Northwest American artist. She has several works in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art collection including The Challenger, and three in the Portland Art Museum including an untitled oil painting referred to as House on Cliff. Exhibitions of her works have occurred in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Gay Outlaw is an American artist working in sculpture, photography and printmaking. She is known for her "rigorous and unexpected explorations of material". She is based in San Francisco, California.
Fernanda D'Agostino is an American artist and sculptor from Portland, Oregon. Her 30-year career includes works that "integrated personal, societal and environmental concerns" into public art installations. Her new media works frequently incorporate technically sophisticated interactive elements.
Olga Liashenko is a Ukrainian German artist und Icon painter, currently living in Germany.