"Svetlana" Painting

Born in Moscow, Russia, into the family of the Russian-Polish intelligentsia – her Russian mother was an editor in the Soviet national daily newspaper 'Izvestia', and her multilingual Polish father, a professor and published historian, worked at the Polish University in Lviv, and later, at the Institute of Slavic Studies in Moscow, - Anya Slonim (nee Misko) grew up in an atmosphere of international history, culture, and art.

On many a day Anya used to leaf through the French magazines that belonged to her mother - Gazette du Bon Ton, Modes et manieres d'aujourd'hui, La Guirlande des Mois – the miraculously survived stylish publications on fashion and design. Their beautiful Art Deco and Art Nouveau illustrations imprinted in her childish imagination would later inspire Anya in her own artistic work.

In 1972, having graduated from the Moscow State University, the department of Fine Arts, with the Majors in Painting and Drawing, Anya started working as a commercial artist in the State Design Centre in Moscow, Russia.

Anya, as many in the Soviet Union at the time, got fascinated with the passionate worlds of the dubbed Argentinian movies that were shown in the cinemas in Moscow. Especially, with the charming Lolita Torres. The beautiful actress and her ‘foreign’ facial features would become another source of inspiration for Anya and would appear on her paintings of femme fatales and elegant temptresses.

However, before Anya could fully devote herself to her artistic career there was a certain dream of hers to still come true. Ever since she was a 12-year-old girl, she had dreamt of going to ‘America’. One of the reasons was her enchantment with jazz that she had a chance to listen to on the radio station ‘Baltika’ transmitting from Poland at her grandmother’s in the Western Belorussia.

Her other fascination with the far away land of ‘America’ was created by the movie she had seen – The Magnificent Seven (1960). Anya had fallen in love with each of The Seven but in particular with the characters Steve McQueen and Yul Brynnen played.

Anya’s ‘American’ dream was finally realised in 1990 when she, her two children and her husband immigrated and settled down in Tucson, Arizona.