Maria Kazanskaya · bio · galleries · how to buy · artist's statement ·

Maria Kazanskaya was born in the old Russian city of Samara (then Kuibyshev). Magnificent Volga river, picturesque Zhiguli hills, and those parts of the old town that survived storms of the 20th century, all shaped her sense of beauty. As early as in elementary school teachers noticed her talent and recommended her to enter the special art school. Then she studied drawing, painting, sculpture, and art history in the Samara art college, from which she graduated cum laude. In 1982 Maria entered the internationally renowned Moscow High School of Applied Arts (Stroganoff School), an institution founded in 1825 with rich traditions of art teaching. Maria mastered drawing in the class of a well-known sculptor Lev Mikhailov, who helped her to develop the feeling of space and shape in drawing. Frequent excursions to rich art collections of Moscow and Leningrad museums formed her taste, and especially appreciation of late 19th and early 20th-century Russian and French art. Her student works were praised by the faculty artists, and most of them are kept in the School's collections.

Upon arriving in the US in 1993 she created a number of landscapes inspired by the West Coast's beautiful nature. They drew attention of galleries and were purchased by collectors. Since then she has exhibited in galleries in California (Berkeley and Carmel), in NYC, Long Island, Chicago, and NJ. The distinctive painterly style of her still lifes and landscapes, is defined by the dual vision of a painting, which she sees both as a decorative plane per se, and at the same time as a space in which the depicted object lives.

Maria is a full artist member of the American Artist's Professional League, her works were featured in Inter Alia magazine (Great Britain) and Il Museo che non c'e CD-ROM (Italy).