APPLES AND ORANGES: Irina Alexandrina Paints New York and Naples
March 24, 2023
By: Leeza Arkhangelskaya, Owner, East West Fine Art
North Naples News, March 2023
Can we compare apples to oranges? Is there anything in common between New York and Naples?
A prominent Florida-based, Irina Alexandrina, answers positively: we love both of them!
According to Alexandrina, cities are like people. They have their own characters, habits, inclinations. They have their own preferences and tastes, merits and faults.
For Irina, any city is a source of inspiration. Whether it is Prague, Berlin, or Florence – she is looking for a mood, not a specific postcard view.
All the beauty of the artist’s soul is revealed in her works. They, like a mirror, reflect the inner world of a subject, allowing you to understand her worldview. In Alexandrina’s paintings, a mysterious original atmosphere is created, which evokes many feelings, thoughts and emotions, compelling the viewer to touch the facets of her imaginative world.
Alexandrina’s cityscapes dedicated to New York amaze with a bold and non-trivial vision, a memorable style, and a special relationship with the city. Irina shows New York as a city with a splendid history and unique architectural ensembles.
As a talented, modern master of the urban landscape, she paints New York of her own, with her unique style combined with warmth and love for the city. In her paintings, New York appears intimate and spiritual: people walk through the streets, boats sail along the coast, streetlights cast warm light on leafy boulevards…
Irina says that her painting style and artistic views were formed under the influence of Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Paul Cezanne, Jean Bérault. This is fully felt in the lightness and translucency of the images of Naples, Florida that she creates. The streets of Naples are depicted with sincere love. The artist manages to skillfully convey the special, incomparable charm of our southern town.
Irina’s Naples is exquisitely beautiful and friendly. It is a town that opens its arms to the people from all over the word and is always filled with romance and sophistication. It is the town of musicians and artists, the town that many great people call home and contribute to its unique culture and lifestyle.
Irina loves both Naples and New York and often visits them. Such trips usually take several weeks, sometimes months, because it takes a lot of time to “feel the metaphysics of the city,” as the artist says.
Irina graduated from the most exclusive and prestigious art academy in the world – Repin’s Art Academy in St. Petersburg, Russia. She has participated in more than three dozen personal exhibitions, including exhibitions in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Prague, Barcelona, and Florence.
Nowadays, the works of Irina Alexandrina adorn the expositions of numerous corporate collections of leading banks of our country and the near abroad, as well as numerous private collections.