The Gallery
Figuratives
As a disciplined, academically based painter, Leon Oks is able to smoothly weave that basic underlying foundation into a tapestry of his own unique fanciful inspiration. As one very important catalyst for his interior vision, he uses the female form. He paints her with fluid brushstrokes, luminous sparkling color and dynamic movement, multiple perspectives with flowing lyrical lines and resplendent sensuous beauty.
His women are vessels of creative power and span the range of human emotions. She is NATURE, MOTHER, JOY, SORROW, and STRUGGLE.
He abstracts the essence of his subject and makes it his own.
Childhood Memories
In his bittersweet nostalgia of his years in the Ukraine, under suffocating Soviet bureaucracy, Leon Oks is able to retrieve the sweetness and ignore the bitterness.
With a palette of soft amber's, burgundies and golds, he evokes idyllic, rounded, shaky, charming villages, soft flowing landscapes, and swaying birch trees, alive in their ever changing wooded golden greens.
The mood is warm, soft and seductive, as we recognize the depth and emotional power of Leon’s work.
Landscapes
The greatest experience is to draw and paint from life models.
Nature is the supreme and pure instructor.
Painting outdoor plain air is a unique opportunity to see and learn about composition and color.
Expressionism
Leon’s arrival in the U.S. in 1980 was more than a liberation of his body, but an exhilarating, freeing of his heart, mind and artistic soul. He could bring his own unique dimension to the canvas.
The seeds that were germinating internally for so long flourished and flowered into the paintings we see today; the female form, lush and sensuous, alone or in intricate organic clusters, the tottering little villages evoking bittersweet nostalgia of his childhood, and his forest of birch trees, which breathe and sway and speak to us.
His work of myriad variation makes us know him.
