PORT HUENEME : Russian Artist Meets Students

The painting featured a man sitting on a drum beneath an orange sky, thinking. Beside him, two headless bodies sat like mannequins on a stagecoach.

While living in America for the past two years, Russian artist Slava Soukhoroukov said he painted the canvas to illustrate how his people have not been allowed to use their heads to think or form opinions.

“This man has gone away from his people,” said Soukhoroukov’s art agent, Paula Spellman, as she helped the artist answer questions asked by 30 Hollywood Beach School students in Port Hueneme on Thursday.

Spellman told the students that the man in the painting was thinking: “I want to make my decisions for myself, so I’m going to leave my people and sit alone. But his society said, ‘No, don’t think.’. . . . That is why Slava’s government didn’t like his paintings.”

The 41-year-old artist, whose only English consisted of “fantastic” and “no problem” when he arrived two years ago, is still learning. He is living with Spellman and her husband, who discovered Soukhoroukov’s art at a private--and illegal--showing in his apartment in Leningrad--now St. Petersburg--in Russia.

The session with Soukhoroukov and Spellman was being videotaped and broadcast live by Hueneme High School students to the district’s 11 schools.

That videotaped session, as well as a subsequent interview with a high school newspaper reporter, will be used in social studies classes in the fifth, sixth and junior high grades, Hollywood Beach Principal Alan Nishino said.

Soukhoroukov put up another painting showing several men supporting a man, resembling former Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who was lying on a ledge. He explained that the work illustrated the symbiotic relationship between the former Soviet people and past dictators.

He then turned the painting upside down to show how dictators can turn on their people.

“Stalin killed many millions of people after people helped Stalin,” he said.

But the era of glasnost has changed the former Soviet Union into the Commonwealth of Independent States, Spellman said.

The district’s two junior high schools watching the session were able to ask questions of Soukhoroukov by a special hookup.

Asked by a student if he had experienced conflicts with the KGB, the artist said he knew friends who were imprisoned five years for holding private exhibits of their paintings in their homes. “But now wonderful time,” he said, referring to his two years living in America. “New freedom.”