Pyman A. Kirill Sokolov - a Russian Artist in England

Kirill Sokolov – a Russian Artist in England by Avril Sokolov Kirill – Russian on his father’s side, of mixed Dutch, German and Russian on his mother’s, was born in 1930 in Moscow, where he grew up and went to school, studied art at the Surikov Institute... More

Kirill Sokolov – a Russian Artist in England by Avril Sokolov Kirill – Russian on his father’s side, of mixed Dutch, German and Russian on his mother’s, was born in 1930 in Moscow, where he grew up and went to school, studied art at the Surikov Institute (1949-57) and lived and worked as a professional artist and illustrator until 1974, when he moved to England. Childhood holidays in and near Leningrad (now again Sankt Peterburg), where his grandmother had lived until the war with a younger daughter, who perished in the blockade, and a brief period of evacuation to Saratov, from whence his father’s family originally stemmed, together with sketching camps from art school and the village of Karavaevo in the Volga forests near Kostroma, where his architectfather was drafted to work as builder’s foreman after his release from five years’ forced labour in the Urals in 1950, were all Kirill knew of a wider Russia. Later, after our marriage in 1963 and particularly after the birth of our daug Less