1979 - 1972

“As long as Okshteyn remained in Soviet Ukraine. where he was born in 1951 and studied drawing and painting at the Odessa Academy of Fine Arts, his paintings indeed tended to express, with a kind of nostalgic tenderness. mainly his quite filial attachment to the landscapes and citi-scapes of his native Bukovina. Until he emigrated to the United States in 1980, he painted all these in a kind of “School of Paris” idiom vaguely reminiscent al times oi Utrillo and other Montmartre painters.”
___ Edouard Roditi, Los Angeles

“Okshteyn, separated by time and space from the Russian modernists of the twenties and leaving behind the French inspired academic approaches of expressionism, produces a different impression of life around him. He is like a tree, which is uprooted by forces beyond his control, the storms of our times; but his roots are strong, imbedded in his art, and transplanted, grows and gives fruit. He is an artist who gets stronger, his vision clear, a hidden intellectual who observes the world around him and shows it in his metamorphoses. He is not ethnic art, not Russian, nor local, but international in scope and understanding.”     
___Emil G. Schnorr, Conservator, G.W.V. Smith Art Museum, Springfield, MA

UKRAINE MAGAZINE