An Artist’s Calling : Victor Kazanin Is a Modern-Day Michelangelo, Filling a Church With Holy Images

EL RIO —  In an old Eastern Orthodox church watched over by saints and martyrs, Russian-born painter Victor Kazanin perfects his creation, as if moved by the hand of God.

Driven by a vision not even he fully understands, the artist adds curls of shadow and hints of blush to a canopy of religious images now layering the walls and ceiling of this little-known sanctuary.

This is not so much a job for Kazanin as it is an act of worship, a testament of faith.

That spiritual core serves as his guide during marathon sessions of prepping and painting, each brush stroke bringing him closer to transforming the church into a reflection of its imperial Orthodox past.

“It is difficult to explain the energy or where it comes from, but I don’t seem to have direct control,” said Kazanin, 41, who was lured from Washington, D.C., more than a year ago by church leaders eager to tap a centuries-old Orthodox tradition of blending art and religion.

“It feels to me like a gift,” he said. “When I do a painting, I feel as if God is in me.”

The Russian immigrant and his larger-than-life frescoes seem oddly out of place in this Ventura County barrio, where the immigrants are mostly Latino and the artwork leans toward graffiti scrawl.

But in reality, he provides an important link to the county’s immigrant past, opening a window on an obscure period of migration that saw the arrival of hundreds of World War II refugees to work the area’s crop-rich farmland in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

It was a small community of these displaced people--mostly Russian, but Hungarian and Latvian too--who banded together in 1966 to construct the Holy Trinity Eastern Orthodox church block by block, raising it from the ground up north of Oxnard.

The project was meant as an offering to God, an act of thanksgiving for escaping war and oppression.

“It was a hard time for everybody and I would say it is a miracle we stayed alive,” said 79-year-old Victor Bublick of Camarillo, a church founder who has watched membership dwindle to about 30 parishioners on any given Sunday.

“That is why we built the church, to thank God for that,” he said. “And now we are doing something in keeping with our tradition.”

Creating a Tapestry of Biblical Icons

The domed sanctuary is barely visible from the Ventura Freeway, its onion-bulb spires poking above the rooftops of this working-class community like ice cream swirls atop sugar cones.

Ringed by wrought-iron bars, the church compound is like an island in this neighborhood where some of the roads are still made of dirt and the streets flood whenever there’s a hard rain.

But although the outside of the church embodies the unmistakable character of Russian architecture, the interior never matched the vision of its creators until Kazanin arrived last summer.

Over the past year, on walls once empty and white, he has spread a brilliant tapestry of biblical scenes and solemn-faced icons in acrylic splashes of teal and crimson and gold.

Setting a pattern repeated throughout the paintings, visitors are greeted by oversized transcriptions of the Lord’s Prayer, written in English on one side and Russian Cyrillic on the other.

A wall scene depicts Palm Sunday, showing Christ riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. On the ceiling there is a work entitled “The Ascension of Our Lord,” depicting angels lifting an 8-foot-tall Christ figure to the heavens after the Resurrection.

And in neat lines, like postage stamps marching across the plaster, are portraits of saints and martyrs, their eyes blank and emotionless in keeping with the ancient Byzantine style that grew to become Russia’s national art form.

“We’re dealing with a level of artist that is extremely hard to find in this country,” said church member Valentin Gladstone, who occasionally serves as Kazanin’s interpreter. “It’s a very rare situation. We feel privileged to have him here.”

But for Kazanin, the privilege is all his.

In Ventura County he has developed a kinship with the Russian emigres who arrived before him, having a deep understanding of their struggle for freedom and their ability to find refuge in the church.

Trained in some of the finest art schools in Moscow, Kazanin found himself at the age of 21 locked into a job as a government artist. For five years he toiled, painting coffee mugs and other trinkets for the country’s tourist trade.

That’s when he sought his own form of sanctuary, finding work as an artist for the Eastern Orthodox Church in Moscow.

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There he won a national competition and in 1992 joined a team of iconographers recruited to apply their delicate craft to the walls and ceiling of St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in Washington, D.C., the national cathedral of the Orthodox Church in America.

Because he works for a church, he was able to emigrate from Russia to paint the walls in Washington.

And it was there that Kazanin learned of the job in El Rio, contacted by Bublick’s daughter, Tatiana, who works for the U.S. Embassy in Washington.

“I found refuge in the church,” said Kazanin, who after years on his own in the United States has finally been joined by his wife and two children in El Rio. “God helped me escape my circumstances. The opportunities were there and I saw my future.”

Today, things are different in Mother Russia. After years of being beaten down by the forces of communism, religion is enjoying a resurgence.

New liberalizing policies of openness and restructuring have relaxed government’s grip on the church.

But Kazanin said these new developments mean little to him. Here in America he has found artistic freedom. And after all, what is more important?

“Russia is still a closed society where people try to push you down,” he said. “I have no nostalgia for that place. As far as I’m concerned, this is now my home.”

A Year of Work Remains to Be Done

For at least the next year, home for Kazanin and his family will be a small house on the church property where they have lived since coming to Ventura County.

Kazanin’s 16-year-old son, Igor, is a sophomore this year at Rio Mesa High School. And his daughter, 9-year-old Anastasia, is in fourth grade at Rio Real Elementary School.

In many ways, they are typical kids. Igor loves pizza and the beach and Anastasia has learned to dance the Macarena. Both are quickly picking up the English language. And what they don’t learn in school they get by watching such television shows as the Simpsons.

Perhaps the greatest blessing was that they landed in El Rio, a community that has absorbed generations of newcomers who have struggled to learn the language and adopt a foreign culture on the way to making a better life for themselves.

“The surnames are different, but the stories are much the same,” said Ventura resident Mike Wittlin, a bilingual education teacher at Anastasia’s school who has befriended the family.

“My grandmother came from Russia in the 1920s and I know she had a few people helping her along the way,” Wittlin said. “I figured if I could help in some small way it was just kind of repaying a due.”

Kazanin and his wife, Svetlana, also are trying to fit in. They take night classes at a local school, learning English alongside their Spanish-speaking neighbors.

But during the day, for hours at a time, both can be found in the cavernous sanctuary, paintbrushes in hand. Svetlana is also an artist, and she devotes herself to the fine detail work that adds intricate dimension to her husband’s creation.

There is still a year’s worth of work to be done at the church, Kazanin said.

Blank spaces along the ceiling, for example, will soon hold a range of biblical images, designed to harmonize with what has already been painted, all blending like the notes of music in a song.

And when he is done, he hopes there is another church somewhere that will hire him on to do the same work.

He is now a permanent resident, and hopes to become an American citizen a few years from now.

Neither he nor church members will say what he is earning for this job. But he will say he only earns about one-fifth of what he could make commercially.

“The money is not the important thing,” Kazanin said. “This is my life, my whole life. I know it is a hard thing for people to understand, but I am working from my soul.”