Destiny’s child follows her dreams

Destiny’s child follows her course.

EverythingWestport.com

Friday, August 08, 2008

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Read Ms. Alexeieff-Rockwell’s complete autobiography.

“I was destined to be an artist,” said the ever gracious, 84-year-old Svetlana Alexeieff-Rockwell. Svetlana perched on a stool and surveyed the room about her. Friends and fellow artisans had come to see and celebrate her latest exhibition of pastels. She spent the past winter creating the work, 21 pastels mostly of Westport, now on display at Gallery 4, Tiverton 4 Corners.

“I have never been motivated to become an artist, I was born one,” she answered in response to a question. “The first thing I was given as a toddler was pencils and paper. My parents were artists and their friends were artists.” Svetlana mused for a moment. “The only strength I own comes from my visual education. That in itself is very unusual. Most people lack that; very few children have had this kind of exposure. I was extremely privileged to have been brought up in this milieu between the two wars in Paris when art was deeply respected and appreciated.”

Svetlana pointed to several of her pastels. “I am in love with horizontality. Horizontal lines are calming and they force the eye to cross either the paper or the canvas from left to right or vice versa. I enjoy pastels because of their intensity and the flexibility in use. I find that that medium has not been explored enough. I also know that once framed they can last a long time perhaps even longer than oils.”

Svetlana feels it is her sense of duty to pass on to others her artistic interpretation of the natural beauty that surrounds her. She settled in her Westport house four years ago when she decided to write her Memoirs and do pictorial works inspired by the coastal villages of southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

During the thirty years spent in the Boston area Svetlana first worked as an illustrator for the Peabody Museum of Anthropology at Harvard and for the Ford Foundation.

She worked for the architect Ben Thompson at his store Design and Research in the department of interior design and later worked for him as a consultant. She helped Nina Nielsen and her husband start their gallery on Newbury Street in Boston and then became the assistant head of the New England School of Art and Design. During that period Svetlana kept on painting and sold her work here and abroad. She opened a gallery in Cambridge where she mainly represented the works of contemporary artists who made quilts. It is there she met her good friend and co-worker Gina Kamentsky, who came from Boston to her friend’s opening reception.

Left: Artisan friend and former Somerville co-worker, Gina Kamentsky with Svetlana.

“If I had to choose a medium, however, I would choose encaustic, which I have used in the last fifteen years when I had my studio in Somerville. In Westport I do not have the facility to use this marvelous medium, the medium which was used in Italian churches for centuries and before that by the Greeks and the Egyptians,” Svetlana said.

Svetlana started her career by illustrating a book for Pantheon Book, and went to the Artist Student League in New York. She befriended Wiliam de Kooning and his wife, took modern dancing with Martha Graham and acted in a Claudel play with Yul Brynner, and finished her academic studies at the French Lycee in Manhattan. She went back to Paris in 1946 where she continued to paint. Her canvases were shown to the famous collector Henri Kahnweiler who asked her to prepare a show of twenty paintings. “I needed to go further in my explorations and experimentation, so I refused, and came back to the States a couple of years later with my new husband Paul Rockwell,” Svetlana said. “I regret that decision now,” she said with the smile of hindsight. “It would have launched me.”

“By looking at someone’s art work we begin to see what the world might look like through another person’s eyes.

By looking at the world refracted we cultivate communication at a higher level as well as compassion.”

Svetlana Alexeieff-Rockwell

Click here to read the exhibition announcement.

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Biography of Svetlana Alexeieff-Rockwell

Svetlana was born in 1923 between the two great wars in Paris.

Her father Alexandre Alexeieff born in the town of Kazan in Russia spent his early childhood in Istanbul where his father was the naval attaché to the Russian Embassy. When Alexeieff was five his father was shot by a Turk during a mission to Germany. This forced the family to retreat to Saint Petersburg where they stayed until the revolution broke out in 1917.

Her mother’s father Alexandre Grinevsky came from European nobility. He fell in love with a beautiful Polish girl who had been hired to teach him French. Vera became young Alexander’s lover and produced a child. Svetlana’s mother’s destiny was shaped by the frightful snobbishness of the time and as a baby she was taken to

Paris to be adopted by her Aunt who held a musical salon in the French capital.

The revolution altered the lives of the two families. Alexeieff was pushed with his cadet companions through Siberia and ended on a boat owned by the czar in Vladivostok. The boat took the cadets to Egypt and was forced during a storm to anchor in Southern France.

Alexeieff jumped ship and ended up in Paris where he worked as a set designer for the Diagilevs Ballets Russes under Leon Bakst. Soon after he made himself a name as a rare book illustrator. He illustrated Tchekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak, Malraux, Poe, Soupault, Hoffman, and Julian Greene.

Alexandra Grinevsky left her aunt to become a character actress in the Parisian avant-garde called the Pitoeff Theater where plays by Pirandello, Shaw, Ibsen and Thchekov were played for the first time in Europe. Alexandra met Alexeieff in 1921 and introduced him to the Pitoeffs for whom he designed sets.

Svetlana was born in 1923. Her childhood was spent surrounded by some of the most famous artists of the time who were friends of her parents such as the writers Andre Malraux and his wife Clara, the surrealist poet Philippe Soupault, the painter Marc Chagall and the sculptor Alexandre Calder.

The Second World War forced the family to move to New York along with many of their close friends.

went back to Paris in 1946 where she continued to paint. Her canvases were shown to the famous collector Henri Kahnweiler who asked her to prepare a show of twenty paintings. Needing to go further in her explorations she refused to do so and came back to the States a couple of years later with her new husband Paul Rockwell.

Paul Rockwell came from a prominent family in Bristol. As an actor he joined a theater company which toured New England and decided to go to Paris a year later to study the French Theater. He married Svetlana and the couple returned to the States. Svetlana gave birth to four children, Niki, Valery, Sacha and Alex. They attended Shady School in Cambridge where Edward Yeomans was the school master. The Rockwells were introduced to Westport through Ed. They acquired the old Macomber Farm across the road from him.

During the thirty years spent in the Boston area Svetlana first worked as an illustrator for the Peabody Museum of Anthropology at Harvard and for the Ford Foundation.

She opened a gallery in Cambridge where she mainly represented the works of contemporary artists who made quilts.

For the past fifteen years Svetlana lived in the Brickbottom Artist Building in Somerville, where she exhibited the works of artists’ friends as well as her own work. She settled in her Westport house four years ago when she decided to write her Memoirs and do pictorial works inspired by the New England coast.

Svetlana Alexeieff-Rockwell

artist + writer

Phone: (508) 636-1353

Email: svetrock@charter.net