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Bio
Born in St. Petersburg in 1967, Anya Rubin is, at her core, Russian. Her earliest years were spent in that country’s sweeping beauty and culture. Her first memories are of an extended family of artists and musicians steeped in Russian tradition.
Yet Anya’s soul is also stamped with the mark of the immigrant. In 1973, her family left Russia, making the circuitous route toward America. First, Vienna. Then some time in Israel. Then Germany. Finally, in 1975, at the age of 9, a few years after leaving Russia, Anya found herself in the crazy-quilt world of Queens, New York. As the adults in her family strived to make their mark in the New World, young Anya was often left to her own devices. Anya turned inward, where she found a rich (and portable) mental life of visualization and fantasy that was to sustain her through her migratory childhood and into her adult life.
She met Edward Rubin in 1984. The two were married in 1991. But it wasn’t until 1997 that Anya’s rich inner life decided it wanted out, that it wanted to make itself known to the wider world. What prompted the dramatic turn of events was the equally dramatic birth of her triplets, Raquelle, Max, and Alec. Suddenly, years of emotion, thought and spirituality rushed to the surface. She was, she says, “seized by a spiritual force.”
She began to paint.
Though largely self-taught and usually working straight from emotion, Anya is a disciplined artist who understands that art is as much work as it is passion. Her art is, after all, her salvation, her way of communicating with the world, making sense of the universe. Anya was influenced by the works of Anselm Kiefer, Gustav Klimt, and Lucien Freud and Max Ernst but oddly it is one of Kiefer’s mentors, Mircea Eliade, who seems to speak most directly to her. Eliade writes that the history or religion shows us that “spirituality introduced freedom into the cosmos. It allows the possibility of transcending the boundaries.” He describes the concept of faith in salvation as an age-old human effort to survive “the tyranny of history.” So it only makes sense that as Anya’s parents sought, in their own way, to escape the tyranny of history, their child found freedom in her own inner cosmos, tried to transcend her own boundaries. And, ultimately, her painting has become her faith.
