Irina Baldina

Biography

Irina Baldina’s diploma work in 1952 was not a painting but the design of a stage production, “Earth in Bloom”. For a painter at the Repin Institute in Leningrad, the art school that later became part of the Academy of Arts, this was an unexpected choice, and I have no documents explaining why the subject turned out to be theatrical.

She was born in Moscow in May 1922. Sources give the exact day differently.

In 1940–1941 she studied at the Moscow Institute of Applied and Decorative Arts. Then came the war, and Baldina returned to painting only after it. In 1945 she was admitted to the first year of the Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad. Her teachers there were Alexander Debler, Boris Fogel and Alexander Segal, and she graduated in 1952 from the studio of Mikhail Bobyshov. While still a student she married the painter Alexei Eriomin (1919–1998), later a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation. Their daughter Natalia also became a painter. From the early 1950s Baldina exhibited regularly, in city, republican, all-Union and international shows. Her works hung alongside those of the leading Leningrad painters. She painted portraits, landscapes, still lifes, genre compositions and a great many studies from life. In 1957 she was admitted to the Leningrad Union of Artists, in its painting section. Until 1992 the organisation was called the Leningrad branch of the Union of Artists of the Russian Federation; it later became the Saint Petersburg Union of Artists.

Her early works have plain titles: “The Road to Oyash” and “Summer Cottages” (both 1954), “Young Rowan Tree” and “Evening” (1956), “Flower Bells” and “Lilac” (1957). Then people appear in the titles: “Natasha” (now in the Vologda Regional Art Gallery) and “Girls on the Rock” (1960), “Uzbek Woman” and “Nurse” (1962), “Uzbek Women” (1964). Among the portraits are “Postwoman Matryona Petrovna Rodionova of Yandomozero” and a portrait of a man named Baldin (both 1967), a portrait of Dmitri Shostakovich (1971) and a portrait of the artist Alexei Eriomin (1977).

In the 1960s to 1980s the main subjects of her work were her contemporaries, the landscape and the people of the Lake Onega region. To this period belong “A Youth” (1975) and “War Veteran Spirova, Mother of the Stalingrad Heroine Natasha Kochuevskaya” (1980). In 1990 she painted “Irina Andreyevna Fedosova, Folk Storyteller of the Onega Region”.

Baldina’s manner is marked by broad handling and a lively, energetic brushstroke; over the years it became more decorative. She worked confidently in the open air and conveyed shades of mood and colour relationships in northern nature. To my mind, her style was shaped by her many years of joint work with Eriomin, though little detail about this is known.

Baldina died in Saint Petersburg on 15 January 2009, in her eighty-seventh year. Her paintings are in museums and private collections in Russia, France, the United States, Japan and other countries.