ALLA JABLOKOW
June 21, 1929 – January 24, 2024
Alla Jablokow was an artist and a nature lover who, displaced by the destruction of WWII, had to emigrate twice, first from Russia, then from Germany. She finally settled in LaGrange Park, Illinois to raise three children with her husband Victor, and became a successful watercolorist, art teacher, and devoted member of the LaGrange Art League. Victor predeceased her by 20 years and she missed him every day. She is survived by her children Alexander, Natalie, and Peter, and her grandchildren Lara, Brian, Simon, and Faith, and her great grandaughter Liana Victoria, whose pictures brought her great joy in her last year. She was much loved, and is much missed.
A Russian childhood
An only child, she grew up near Smolensk, an ancient Russian city some 200 miles southwest of Moscow. Her mother Vera was Ukrainian and her father Ignatiy was of Baltic German ancestry, but she always regarded herself as Russian. Her mother was a doctor and her father an engineer. Her mother Vera’s immediate family, all farmers, had been destroyed during the collectivization, starvation, and repression in Ukraine, and she was the only survivor.
Alla remembered loving both nature and art from the very first. She created elaborately illustrated books as a girl, some of which the family still possesses. In her recollection, both her parents were skilled artists, and her mother imparted her own love of nature to her.
A German adolescence
The family fled the Soviet Union during the chaos of the war, and settled in western Germany, near Brunswick. German demand for skilled workers meant they had a place there. Those who grew up in the United States have no idea of what people had to do to survive during that time.
Alla always preferred to say that her father died in an air raid during the war, but in fact he disliked Germany intensely, despite his ancestry, and returned to the Soviet Union, where he vanished, likely caught up in Stalin’s postwar repression of ex-POWs and collaborators.
That left just Alla and her mother Vera, and they remained close for the rest of her mother’s life.
Alla learned to speak German, graduated high school, and started college, but still missed the home of her childhood and would dream about flying around the beautiful 18th century towers of the Smolensk Dormition Cathedral, which dominates the city.
A new American life
With the assistance of World University Services, a charitable group, Alla emigrated to the United States in 1951 at age 22. Her mother had to find another path, and could only get there four years later.
Alla had only limited English, but found a job at the University of Pennsylvania, where she met Victor Jablokow, a Russian from Kharkov, in eastern Ukraine. They fell in love. They moved to Chicago, since Illinois would recognize his German medical credentials. There, Alla received a Masters degree in biology from the University of Chicago in 1955. A picture of her in her cap and gown with her husband at graduation always stood on the bureau in their bedroom.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Whether I confront the Great Panoramic Outdoors or just a few wildflowers growing under my feet, the result is the same: I am filled with awe and a wonderful sense of well-being. Nature's abundance is a delight for the eye and food for the soul.
I photograph Nature at close range (roots, foilage, rocks, flowers...), then study the slides and use them as reference. The goal is clean bright colors and a strong overall design. Most of the slides are the results of trips to the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois and to Door Peninsula in Wisconsin.
I paint with the Seasons - I love all four of them. My moods and energies depend on them, and the changes are reflected in my paintings. I paint because I must. I also feel I must share my experience with others. I was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1929. WIl transplanted my family from Russia to Germany, then in 1951 to the United States. I enrolled in the University of Chicago and received a Master's Degree in biology in 1955. The study of ecology, with numerous field trips, was instrumental in shaping my powers of observation and teaching me to see relationships and patterns in Nature. Actually, I had been aware of those patterns since my earliest childhood.
As I was raising my family, I took art classes at night and quickly settled on watercolor as my favorite medium. I took workshops with nationally known watercolorists whom I looked up to like Zoltan Szabo, Frank Webb, Nita Engle, Barbra Nechis.