About the Artist

My grandmother, Yekaterina Ivanovna Potapova, grew up in Penza in a family of considerable standing. Her father served the Tsar as a railroad official, a position that afforded the family both comfort and, when the time came, a way out of Russia after the first war. They settled eventually in northern Indiana — a long way from Penza — in one of those narrow houses on a quiet street with a closed-in winter porch and a detached garage and a garden out back where she grew dill and beets and whatever else she needed for her borscht.

Grandmother kept an easel and a taboret next to her rocking chair by the window, and she would paint from memory — copies of paintings she had known in Penza. Savrasov, Levitan, Shishkin. I remember sitting on the floor watching her work on a copy of Savrasov's The Rooks Have Returned, the careful way she mixed that grey sky, the patience she had with those bare birch branches. She never sold anything or showed anywhere. She painted because painting was something she carried with her from the old country, like her recipes for pirozhki and her insistence that you must always keep a wound clean.

Nearly everyone on that side of the family has picked up a brush at one point or another. Cousins, aunts, uncles — some of them quite good. But life has a way of getting in the way, and one by one they set the brushes down. I am the one who has not.

I came to painting seriously later in life, after years spent in work that had nothing to do with art. My path to the easel was not a straight line. But when I finally committed to it — when I stopped treating it as a hobby and started treating it as a discipline — I realized that everything Grandmother had shown me by example was still there, waiting. The patience. The mixing. The willingness to sit with a painting and let it tell you what it needs next.

"There is no such thing as talent that does not first require someone standing behind you while you are small, showing you that the thing is possible."

Artistic Focus

My work draws from the Russian landscape tradition that I absorbed watching Grandmother paint — the atmospheric quality of the Peredvizhniki, the quiet emotional weight of a Levitan twilight, the way Savrasov could make mud and melting snow feel like a hymn. I work primarily in tonalist and impressionistic modes, though I have been increasingly drawn to abstraction as a way of distilling landscape down to its essential emotional content. Light, atmosphere, and the passage of time are the real subjects of my work, regardless of what is depicted on the surface.

Medium & Technique

I work in oils on canvas and linen, occasionally on panel. My palette tends toward the muted and atmospheric — ochres, umbers, cool greys, the kind of colors you find in the sky twenty minutes after sunset when the world has not yet decided whether it is still evening or already night. I paint primarily from life and from studies done on location, though studio work allows me to push further into abstraction and tonal experimentation than plein air conditions typically permit.

Available Work

Original paintings and high-quality giclee prints are available for purchase. Prints are produced by Osio-Brown Editions, ensuring museum-quality reproduction on archival paper.

Commissions

I am not accepting commissions at this time.