Alexander Stolin

Dear Eva...

2022

Framed Dimensions: 11h x 11w in Alexander Stolin, born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine (under the former Soviet Socialist Republic), where he received intensive training and a master of fine arts degree in his homeland’s traditional art academies. He immigrated to San Francisco in 1992, met his future wife in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, then married and settled in New Orleans. He maintains a home and studio in Madisonville, Louisiana, and is a significant but understated figure in the New Orleans art community. As art critic D. Eric Bookhardt suggested in 2002, “Stolin is more accomplished than he is famous.” His art, often exhibited in thematic series that incorporate a variety of media, ranges from intimate portraits to large-scale murals (one measuring twelve feet by seventy-two feet). He has worked on a progressively larger scale, most recently designing and painting projects for the Louisiana film industry. Stolin’s technically proficient and complexly layered art reflects a unique fusion of the academic training he received in Kiev and his evolving response to the very different culture, lifestyle, and subject matter he has discovered in New Orleans, Madisonville, and the Gulf South. Stolin was born on August 30, 1963. His art abilities were quickly recognized when in fourth grade he qualified for admission to the State School of Art in Kiev, which he attended from 1975 to 1981. He decided to concentrate on book illustration and graphic arts, and after graduating he was accepted into the Ivan Fedorov Polygraphic Institute in Moscow, where he studied from 1982 to 1988, graduating with a master of fine arts degree in 1988. He trained as a printmaker, creating etchings and lithographs, and as a graphic designer, and worked as a designer in Kiev. “I illustrated mysteries, science fiction, and different magazines,” he said. In 1988, after his family visited relatives in San Francisco, California, the Stolins decided to immigrate to the United States, a process that took four years. In 1992, Stolin and his parents immigrated to San Francisco, and he worked for graphic design and print businesses in nearby Emeryville, California. During a trip to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he was visiting cousins, Stolin met Mary Kay Holmes. The couple soon married and moved to New Orleans, where Stolin established himself as a working artist and began to exhibit in local galleries and group exhibitions. The art Stolin began to create in New Orleans demonstrated his technical skills, knowledge of art history, and the evolving range of his subject matter, reflected from one series and exhibition to the next, yet it was challenging for critics to classify his work. This was evident in the series Stolin exhibited during his first decade in the city, beginning with Byzantium on the Bayou (1993–1994), which combined historical Byzantine art references with New Orleans and Mardi Gras subjects, such as Mardi Gras Madonna and Adoration of St. Gator. In his Midnight Dessert series (1995–1997), he created works such as Tea in Manhattan and Rembrandt and Nathan, a large painting that Bookhardt described as “a vision of Rembrandt and various Dutch masters promenading down the sidewalk past Nathan’s Deli in New York.” Following that, he completed The Water Series (1998–1999), featuring reflective and heavily worked surfaces in paintings such as Reflections #2 and Study of Fish and Swimmers. Stolin’s Face to Face series of portraits, completed from 2000 to 2002, featured New Orleans artists including Douglas Bourgeois...

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