“Catching the Light: The Frenchboro Paintings” by Daud Akhriev at the Island Institute’s Archipelago Fine Arts Gallery in Rockland represents the debut showing of this Russian-born painter’s work in Maine.
The exhibition, which runs through Sept. 20, coincides with a feature article on Akhriev written by Scott Sell that appears in the special 25th-anniversary edition of the Island Journal published in May.
In Sell’s profile, we learn that Akhriev has been coming to Frenchboro, Long Island, since 1993 (he emigrated to the United States two years earlier). Each summer he and his wife, fellow painter Melissa Hefferlin, and their son Timur, who also paints, take leave of their home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to steep themselves for a month or so in a potent Maine island ambience.
A Russian painter on a Maine island is not so unusual. Indeed, Monhegan alone has attracted a host of fine painters from Eastern Europe, among them, Morris Kantor (1896-1974) and Abraham Bogdanove (1888-1946), both from Minsk; Andrew Winter (1893-1953), from Sindi, Estonia; and Nicolas Roerich (1874-1947), from St. Petersburg.
Daud Akhriev adds a powerful new vision to this distinguished line, but also to the broader compass of Maine art. Like his predecessors, he has willingly succumbed to the spell of an island, finding in its fog-enshrouded reaches and hard-working inhabitants rich material for his art.
Akhriev was born in 1959 in the former Soviet Union, in Ingushetia in the North Caucasus region. He received classical training in painting and drawing in St. Petersburg, earning a Masters degree with honors from the Repin Institute.
This renowned center of art, named for painter Ilya Repin (1844-1930), was established in 1863 as an alternative to the Academy of Fine Arts. With a philosophy that art should serve the greater good, the institute has long been a hub of Russian social realist art.
Two portraits of a Long Island lobsterman in the Archipelago show are perhaps the most in line with Russian-style social realism. Harking back to Repin’s famous Volga Bargemen, these paintings, Danny, 2007-2008, and Mainer, 2007, are tributes to the proletariat-honest yet noble representations, in this case, of a blond-bearded figure in working attire (an orange hoody and a blue undershirt, respectively) standing by the water.
Akhriev’s Danny seems larger than life, filling up the view with his burly girth. He might be Lucas “Lucky” Lunt, the lobsterman protagonist of William Carpenter’s novel The Wooden Nickel [reviewed in Working Waterfront, August 2002]. As Akhriev told Sell, the Frenchboro fishermen “humble” him.
The exhibition includes several views of the island harbor. Even in these paintings, there is a tension between the poverty and the poetry of the setting. In Harbor Sunset, 2005-2009, for example, the painter is true to the somewhat abject disarray at the water’s edge-scattered lobster pots, rope, remnants of dock timbers and ways-yet he renders with great flair the marvelous spectrum of colors created by all that bric-a-brac heightened by the day’s final light.
Akhriev’s sense of place comes through strongest in the painting Frenchboro Harbor, 2006. Here we have the quintessential island anchorage, with lobster boats floating on a calm surface, their hulls doubled in the water. Like Jack Ledbetter and Peter Ralston, who have photographed this place on many occasions, Akhriev is drawn to the embracing contours of this Atlantic haven. The image is picturesque yet stunningly grounded, as it were, in the realities of a remote Maine island world.
We get a glimpse of the artist’s household in two handsome pastels. Melissa Writing Letters (with its echo of Vermeer) and Melissa with Quilts, both 2005, are slightly different views of the same interior, the painter’s wife seated at the far end of the room. The space is cozy and cool the way island houses are, with pine floors, stuffed couch and fireplace. An arrangement of small paintings on a wall lends it a salon look.
In her essay for the 2001 monograph Daud Akhriev: Stylistic Pluralism, Cathy Byrd, an Atlanta-based critic, outlines the different artistic and cultural influences that have played roles in the painter’s development. In addition to the intensive 14 years in St. Petersburg copying the masters (including Michelangelo, Vermeer and Poussin), Akhriev’s art has reflected what Byrd refers to as “the aesthetics of tragedy.” The painter’s family was deported to north Kazakhstan in 1944, an upheaval that continues to haunt him.
In Scott Sell’s article, Akhriev includes the Wyeths among significant artistic influences. “The northeast, and Maine in particular, has always been mysterious and ancient to me,” the painter relates, “and in some way, it has always been connected to the Wyeth family, because of their images of traditional art.” When he informed his friends in Russia of Andrew Wyeth’s death this past winter, they promised to drink to his memory.
A full-time artist, Akhriev is not limited to easel painting. He has fulfilled several mural commissions in Tennessee. On his website www.daudakhriev.com, under events, he lists the unveiling of two nine-foot bronzes, the spring and summer sections of a piece titled “The Four Seasons,” to be installed in Chattanooga later this year. He has also taught painting in Italy and at the University of Tennessee in his home city.
While Akhriev has shown his paintings in Maine before (at the Turtle Gallery on Deer Isle), this exhibition represents his first solo presentation. In mounting “Catching the Light: The Frenchboro Paintings,” by Daud Akhriev, the Island Institute shines a light on a remarkable painter who deserves broader appreciation among the aficionados of Maine art.
Carl Little’s essay on the creative economy of Maine islands appears in the 2009 Island Journal. He lives and writes on Mount Desert Island.