Dossiers

Aleksandr Pritchin is an Itelmen from the Kovran settlement on the west coast of Kamchatka. He spent the last years of his secondary education at a boarding school in Palana, some 100 km north of his home village. This is where he received strong encouragement from the Itelmen artist and teacher Valeri Zaporotski.

Aleksandr Pritchin started studying stage design and scenery in Vladivostok, soon returing to his home in Kovran, where he at first became a portrait painter. He spent a lot of time with elders, and was impressed by their lifetime memories and the hard times they had had to go through. He tried to express this in his sketches and figures.

In the years 1999-2001 Pritchin created the small, carved figures shown here on the theme “Scenes from Itelmen life”. During this period, he continued to live in Kovran before moving to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski where he shared a workshop for some time with Egor Chechulin, carving objects as souvenirs for tourists.