"Grace" oil portrait by Nikolai Blokhin
ORIGINAL
Painting: Oil on Canvas
Original: One-of-a-kind
Artwork Size: 50cm by 35cm (13.8" W x 19.7" H x 0.5" D)
Frame: Gold Original
Created: 2020
 
   Nikolai Blokhin is renowned for his technical skills, precise craftsmanship, and striking, wild, virtuosic, and gestural brushstrokes. He embodies the prestigious tradition of intensive training that the most extraordinary academic masters perfected and consolidated his foundational skills in drawing and painting in his own genuine neoclassical landmark style. His work is landing in many museums and private collections. He is particularly popular in China, Russia, the Netherlands, Finland, and the U.S.
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        Nikolai Blokhin was born in 1968 in Leningrad (nowadays Saint Petersburg). He started his early art education at his district's art school, then continued (1982) to the Leningrad Secondary Art School, curated by the Academy. And as his talent stood out, he was accepted into the prestigious Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, now known as the world-famous Saint Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts (1989-1995). As for his diploma (1995) theme, Nikolai Blokhin chose Shrovetide. And his masterpiece makes a stunning impression at first glance. Bright and sound colors complement each other spontaneously, with genuine emotions and laughter. His fearless brush perfectly expresses the fun at the end of winter, and the coming of the spring sun. His line’s cheerful colors, wildness, and truly powerful plasticity are stunning at first glance. The play of strokes builds the form and conveys the freedom of his artistry.
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      After graduating from the Academy, Blokhin began teaching drawing at the Academy (1995). Still, after thirteen years of intensive art education, he continued to practice in the Academy creative workshop of Professor V.I. Reikhet for five more years. That will make eighteen years of workshops, studies, and practices to gain his level of mastery. "If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all," Michelangelo Buonarroti once said. And that's precisely the case for Nikolai Blokhin. After all, he taught at the Academy as a Professor of Drawing for over twenty-one years.
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      From 1996 till now, Blokhin participated in countless global art shows, including more than forty personal exhibitions. Blokhin's genuine talent is acknowledged worldwide, and his artworks are collected by respected patrons of the arts, museums, and top collectors. He won many recognitions, including the most prestigious international portrait awards.