Andrei Sorokin named his blue-eyed golden Cocker Spaniel puppy after his favorite painter, Van Gogh.

Faridun Zoda paints in the company of two regally haughty cats.

Inna Kulagina says she has begun "to look at the world more maternally" after becoming a mother herself.
Inna Novikova's most recent passion is the painting, or as it is referred to in Russian, writing of Orthodox icons.

Even though they all speak Russian and all come from the country commonly referred to as "Russia", to call these people simply "Russian artists" would mean missing almost everything that is fascinating and enriching about them.

None of them are actually from Russia. They were born and raised in Soviet Union, a state that united very disparate regions which have since become independent countries.

Of these four, Faridun Zoda is the only one who studied in Moscow, in the same highly exclusive Surikov Art Academy to which Andrei Sorokin never did pass his entrance exams. Andrei and Faridun come from the city of Dushanbe, now the capital of Tajikistan, and are almost the same age. Only Andrei is an effusive, larger-than-life, constantly moving story teller, and Faridun—an introverted, mysterious puzzle master. Faridun's life has been lived in art since he was 10--his father sent him and his brother to Moscow to the art school that served as the prep academy for the Surikov.

"I think Faridun has more discipline," says Andrei, smiling. He earned his art degree in Dushanbe and taught art in secondary schools for a while before becoming a full-time artist. "I liked it more than teaching, then," he remembers. "It's more satisfying, and the money was better." Artists who could get recognition through shows did well in the Soviet Union--the art poster and print industry was very small leaving the lion's share of the consumer market to painters and graphic artists. Educated Soviets appreciated good art, and it was--and still is--common to decorate one's home with original works. Every one of these artists can say exactly what the audience appreciates in his or her work.

"People often tell me that my paintings "are happy," says Inna Novikova.

Inna's larger-than-life flowers glow with golden outlines, and her landscapes seem to shimmer with stardust drifting from the celestial bodies that often dot the skies in her

composition. "My guide in painting is a feeling of happiness. If I feel ecstatic during the process, if colors and compositions make me laugh out loud - the painting is a success (for me). People feel the mood in which I create when they look at my paintings."

Inna was born in another former Soviet republic, Kazakhstan, where her family lived in the capital, Almaty.  Art was an organic part of her childhood.

"My mother—a former collector of Russian Orthodox icons—is artistic and very creative," Inna says. "I grew up in a house with beautiful icons and a nice collection of big coffee-table books on fine arts, crafts, and architecture. As a child I'd spend hours with those books looking at the pictures. "

"I remember when I was about five, my first visit to an Orthodox church. My family wasn't religious, but once my grandmother took me to St. Nicolas church in Almaty. To me it was the most beautiful building in the city. To this day I gravitate towards religious arts and artifacts."  Unlike the other artists in the group, for whom Nebraska was the place to take their already mature careers to the next step, Inna credits her move to Omaha in 1996 as the critical event in her art.

"I was inspired by the local artists, and started experimenting. 99% of my landscapes are inspired by Nebraska farm lands and skies, and I also had a series of cityscapes, which included a few Omaha pieces. I couldn't pass on painting the St. Cecilia's Cathedral. What a treasure!"  

"I was very lucky to have Dee Heller, owner of Heller Art Images Gallery and an accomplished artist herself, as my mentor.  I learned a lot from her about painting, art business and life in general. She is a very inspiring human being. "

The role played in these artists’ lives by Lincoln and Omaha's lively and well cultivated gallery scene is hard to overestimate. It was Noyes Art Gallery that welcomed Faridun as a member in 1994, bringing his work back to Nebraska after his first show in 1989 at the Lied Center in Lincoln. Faridun’s work has been featured in galleries across the US, including solo shows at the United Nations Organization, but when his immigration application was approved in 2000, he chose Nebraska as his new home. Both Faridun and Andrei Sorokin were recognized artists when Soviet Union fell apart unleashing civil conflicts in many republics including Tajikistan, and living in Dushanbe became dangerous. It was Amrita Mahapatra, the owner of Sure Art gallery, who gave Andrei Sorokin his first job as the gallery manager in 1995. And it was Heller Art Images that recognized Inna Kulagina with a solo show shortly after she moved to Nebraska.

In fact, galleries, museums and public spaces across the state, from Fremont to Norfolk, to Kearney, have featured the works of these artists, individually and collectively. 

Now Andrei Sorokin dreams about one day owning his own gallery. He enjoys his work at Trump Memorials in Lincoln where he honed his skills as an etcher.  There, Andrei works on highly detailed portraits, images of angels and wreaths and an occasional Harley Davidson motorcycle. At home, perched under the roof of his old house in South Lincoln in his studio, he lavishes color in muscular, rugged brushwork that characterizes much of his work. 

"When you buy a painting, you don't just bring it home to match your furniture," he jokes. "It's like bringing a piece of another person home with you. A good piece will reach out and touch you. “Indeed, Sorokin's paintings' presence is almost physical--swirls of color literally bulge on canvas as if muscles under a living creature's skin. In a painting of the Lincoln Capitol, the parkland in the foreground is rendered in twists of pure colors, trees riding the banks of the stream under an equally stirred sky.

"This is expressionism," Andrei says. "I want my subject to get a hold of me and not let me go. It's very elemental, and people respond to it, because it is like being a child again, seeing the world with a fresh eye." 

After Andrei came to Lincoln, he worked for a year as a mentor for gifted children in the Lincoln Public Schools mentorship program. He drove around the city teaching art one-on-one to middle-schoolers.

"I learned simplicity from children," he says. "They are so adsorbed in what they see because they respond to it instantly."

Sorokin strives to have the same instant connection to the viewer in his own paintings. His works are almost stormy in their dynamism. Even when painting flowers--and these are everywhere in his house--Andrei creates the illusion of movement in the background suggesting the transformative energy of contemplation. "I am always searching," says Andrei. "I've tried many styles—cubism, abstract painting, expressionism. I think it's the definition of an artist—to keep searching."

The same expressive drive defines work of Inna Kulagina whose larger-than-life portraits have been described as "monumental".

"My paintings are expressionistic in spirit, and my style is evolving with me. I paint mostly using a palette knife, love big canvases." Inna grew up in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Her artistic and personal destiny has taken her around the world to Honduras, where she fell in love with the tropical palette.

"The colors, the sun, constant blossoms all around were the gift that Latin America gave me. I saw the color of young palms and I knew instantly--that's the epitome of the sun itself. I felt so humble in front of this magnificent nature.  I think first time in my life I became so fascinated with the magic of color."

Inna credits David Alfaro Siqueiros, who, along with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco established the Mexican muralist renaissance, as one of the greatest influences on her art. Siqueiros, like many other artists at the time, believed that art is a force of revolutionary change in the world, that an artist fought with his work for something greater than himself. For Kulagina, art is a means of transcending one's personality and reaching out to the world outside in search of one's place in it. As she began thinking about having a child, motherhood became a new theme in her work – with some uncanny results.

“I have a 2004 painting of a little gold-haired boy and an adult giving him his hand—it’s called ’Here is my hand to you’,” she says. “When I was preparing my works for the exhibition in China in 2008 I pulled it out and was stunned to see that the boy looked exactly like my son—with that golden hair, and I painted it before I was even pregnant! It must be that an artist is able to predict her future, and I saw my son before we met each other at the moment of his birth. My paintings are my diary and it is the diary of a woman.”

"What will America give me next?" she asks.  "Which new perceptions and depths? Nebraska has the biggest sky I ever saw, fields full of yellow and brown, clouds kissing the earth, how will I reflect it? Every new place is always an opportunity to learn, to begin again."

"I came here as an accomplished artist in my own right, and to start again, to reinvent yourself is never easy," Inna says. Like other artists who had had professional recognition in the former Soviet Union, she had worked in a society that emphasized the public value of art and made artists feel needed by their cities and communities rather than by individual patrons. After her first visit to Bangkok when, as Inna remembers, “for the first time in my life I saw a big industrial city monster and recognized the beauty and ugliness of it,” she mounted a conceptual exhibit of large paintings on scaffolding in the center Tashkent. 

Adjusting to the entrepreneurial modus operandi of the American art scene can be frustrating. Paradoxically, while the free marketplace can accommodate an infinite variety of style and subject, working without government support, with constant eye towards sales can feel like losing one's artistic freedom.

"An artist works for an audience," comments Faridun Zoda. He shows his work constantly and paints full time.

One of the four large canvasses in the small living room of his ranch house in Southeast Lincoln is "The Return of the Swallows". In the background, red and white farm buildings nestle between trees under the expanse of the blue sky. In the signature Zoda composition, the line of the horizon is low, land withdrawing from the brilliant color of the ether. In the clouds, a flock of sparrow swirls above a meadow. The shapes outlined by the birds' wings and the clouds form the figure of a woman. She is Spring, the ethereal feeling of hope that electrifies the air. Your eye lingers on the painting, held by the easily with which the puzzle fits together. The longer you look, the more details the painting yields -- the sparrows' sparkling eyes, the flower petals raining from Spring's hands, the jewel tones of the red buildings.

"Beauty, Harmony -- those things are really compelling, that's what art is based on -- these are the most important. And it's very important to communicate the emotion: your emotion resonates with other people's feelings and brings them out. If the art doesn't touch, doesn't stop a person in his tracks, it mustn't be reaching them."

On the surface, Faridun's paintings are hyper-realistic—every detail of an ornate scarf's pattern or a bird's lush plumage is painstakingly rendered.  Shapes and objects are immediately recognizable, which is important because the mystery lies in how they fit together. The paintings are fables, sometimes ironic, sometimes sad—but always stories that unfold gradually once the viewer has been drawn in by the stunning colors and the approachable technique.

"I think they like the ideas and the stories told in the work, and the colors. This side, the narrative part of it is what attracts people. Simple composition, but an ironic or humorous fable of meaning behind it is what they like."

Faridun's talent for arranging images into story lines has served the Lincoln community: the building of Lincoln Literacy Council building features his mural that portrays the path of immigrants to empowerment through learning.

If there is something that these diverse artists have in common, it is their passion for finding a place for their work in their community, beyond the walls of art galleries and the residences of a few dedicated collectors. Inna Novikova is finding a spiritual connection to the viewer in the world of the Orthodox iconography; Andrei Sorokin's paintings reach out almost physically, entrapping the viewer in their lassos of color and energy. Inna Kulagina art channels the colors, light, and feeling of her new home into a deeper understanding of the self.

Faridun Zoda painted himself and his wife, Maisun Allahiq, as a pair of acrobats, himself balancing upside down on Maisun's head. He says, smiling, “Maisun's the one with her feet on the ground, and she keeps me connected." Perhaps, what's hidden in that painting are the roots that Faridun and Maisun, a Saudi Arabia-born artist, have planted in the Nebraska soil and that nurture them both like many other artists.

Story by Nina Murray

Photo:  Painting by Inna Kulagina, Playing with Dandelions