Valeria Larina


Valeria Borisovna Larina was a Russian Soviet realist painter, graphic artist, who lived and worked in Saint Petersburg. She was a member of the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists, regarded as one of representatives of the Leningrad school of painting.

Biography

Valeria Borisovna Larina was born April 10, 1926, in the Leningrad, USSR.
In 1946, Valeria Larina entered at the first course of the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture named after Ilya Repin. There she studied under Piotr Belousov, Ivan Stepashkin, Alexander Zaytsev.
In 1953, Valeria Larina graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture as artist of painting in Boris Ioganson workshop, together with Mark Klionsky, Leonid Kabachek, Izzat Klychev, Konstantin Molteninov, Vladimir Seleznev, Nikolai Galakhov, and other young artists. Her graduated work was genre painting named "Young Shipbuilders".
Since 1953, Valeria Larina has participated in Art Exhibitions. She painted portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, still lifes, and sketches from the life. It became the leading genre portrait of a contemporary. In the 1950s she was most famous for her series of expressive portraits of steel-makers and workers from Kirov plant in Leningrad. Later she painted mainly portraits of females and etudes done from nature.
The beauty of tonal relations and soft drawing gives to her portraits the poetic sounds, raising everyday scene up to the complete and profound image. Development of a picturesque manners went in the typical for 1960 direction of strengthening decorative qualities of painting.
Since 1954, Valeria Larina was a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists.
Valeria Borisovna Larina died in Saint Petersburg in 2008. Her paintings reside in museums and private collections in Russia, England, Germany, France, Italy, the U.S., and others.