"Enchanted Forrest"

Igor Sazevich (1929-2022) was born in San Francisco, CA to well-known WPA-era sculptor Zygmund Sazevich and his wife Zenaida, both refugees from the Russian Revolution.

In his earliest years, Sazevich was raised between Paris and San Francisco, but the rumblings of war in Europe sent the family back to San Francisco permanently.

It was a fertile time for the arts in the city. His father, who was receiving numerous commissions for work, was part of the 1939 Art in Action exhibit at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, carving alongside his former teacher, Ralph Stackpole, and many others including Igor’s godfather, the painter Eugene Ivanoff. Sazevich loved taking the streetcar down to the docks to cross the Bay and watch them work.

Sazevich's own restless creativity soon began to make itself apparent. He enrolled at UC Berkeley and found a fitting home at the School of Architecture where the students gathered by day in the coffeehouses and spent wine-soaked nights together. While courting and eventually marrying a Russian woman who was part of a charismatic group of Romanovs and Russian nobility, he started his own architectural practice focused on residential and restaurant design.

In the 1960s, he and his wife purchased land in Inverness, CA, built a weekend home there, and fell into the embrace of West Marin's hippie community. He began to paint more and more, creating murals for restaurant interiors and covering canvases in his art studio on the ridgetop.

In 1978, the newly appointed director of the Sausalito Art Festival, tapped Sazevich and his wife to serve as chief architects, bringing them on to a dynamic team that would revitalize the festival. A stunning design was developed that recycled the material from Christo's 1976 Running Fence, making the festival grounds as distinctive as the artwork on view.

Sazevich's painting practice grew in importance as he entered the next chapter of his life, abruptly precipitated by the fire that took the Inverness house and his wife’s death in 2000. He rebuilt and made his home in West Marin, devoting himself to his art. He and his new partner, a photographer, became members of Gallery Route One in Pt. Reyes, CA, where the two exhibited regularly.

Sazevich’s first love was oil painting, although he was also adept with watercolors. Writing about his practice, he said: Constantly fascinating me is the play of oil paints shifting under a slashing stroke, changing shape, mixing with an adjacent color. Attacking the canvas with paint scrappers, fingers, always reaching for light in the textures of the paints, then something taps me on the shoulder, saying, “Enough! That’s it.”

 

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