Leon was born in 1939 in the small Ukrainian town of Zhitomir in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine.
Leon Oks has several styles of art that reflect the complexity of his experience and the complexity of his creative process. His paintings of sylvan scenes and Russian villages capture the beautiful moments of his youth. To this day, Leon is emotionally motivated to paint scenes of small Russian villages and the untamed rural woods and streams of the Ukrainian plateau. His sensitivity to and awe of Nature is revealed to us through the use of colors which only exist in Leon's imagination and on his canvases.
In his signature, expressionistic style, Leon appears fascinated by the concept of a "feminine" life force. This concept emerges in his depiction of single or multiple female figures with gender well defined and re-emphasized with the sensual symbolism of orchids and people growing and blossoming as if flowers. Oks expressionistic compositions are of intertwined, sinuous and sensual female shapes that are exaggerated but not distorted as if an artful depiction of a DNA helix. The palette is soft but warm which makes Oks paintings so approachable and embraceable. Leon sketches rapid, realistic life studies from which a feeling, a memory, a mood, and ultimately imagination takes over and guides the artist in his expressionistic meanderings.
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Spring Orchids2009
