Now this is a story,” says artist/architect/theater director/lecturer Boris Gorelik in his heavy Russian accent as we sit in the dining room of his Plymouth home, sipping strong coffee and eating chocolate torte with his wife, Tonya. 

“Drink, drink, before it gets cold,” he says, working on his second cup.

In between sips he tells of a childhood in Minsk with a loving father who taught him how to drive at age 7 because he lost a leg in the war and needed help with the pedals, and a mother who filled their warm but modest home with music and literature. He speaks about making sculptures out of tiny lumps of clay and a kind teacher who taught him how to draw in an attic apartment down the street.

There was architecture school and a 20-year career at a prestigious technical university in Belarus. There was Tonya with two master’s degrees and a beloved daughter, Elina, who loved to dance. There was his award-winning musical theater (where he directed, wrote and composed the score), and there was his painting. Yes, beautiful, soulful, punch-you-in-the-gut painting.

It was a rich, full life; one filled with the wonder of art.

But then—Chernobyl.

“We were 200 kilometers from the Chernobyl Nuclear Electrical plant,” Tonya says. “[Nuclear material] rained down on the children on the playground, in the streets, everywhere. It was terrifying.”

A few years later, 10-year-old Elina was bruising easily and showing signs of a serious illness. “We knew we needed clean air and water,” Boris says of the family’s decision to head to Minnesota four years later. “We knew we had to leave.”

With much reluctance, the Soviet Union allowed them to depart. They could take just two suitcases of belongings, so Boris and Tonya had to give away everything they owned, including much of the art he had created through the years. He managed to smuggle out three of his paintings, and two of those hang in the dining room where we sit, constant reminders of where they came from and what they have been through. 

But, as Boris puts it, “this isn’t a sad story. It was what we had to do.” Within a few months of their arrival in Minnesota in 1992, Elina was better. “It was magic,” says Boris, with tears in his eyes. 

There were difficult times, don’t get him wrong: a new country, a new language, a new culture. But Boris found a community of artists in Plymouth—some even hailing from his homeland—and, eventually, he found a job at a large architectural firm where he had a hand in dozens of projects around the world, including a huge resort in Australia and a palace in South Korea that took him six years to create.

Through it all, Boris had his art.

As we walk around his home, we pause in front of each painting, and it’s undeniable to see how the music of his youth has influenced some of these pieces. “I have big love for classical and jazz,” he says.
 
“Music is the most powerful engine of my work.” There is his “Jazz Café,” “The Tambourine,” “Gypsy Rhapsody” and portraits of famed saxophonist Kenny G and Didier Marouani, just to name a few.

Boris recently had the chance to share his artwork with the world when he exhibited his paintings at the Jewish Community Center in Minneapolis and several other galleries in Minnesota and beyond.

These days, he spends his days in an upstairs studio/office deciding whether he will paint, take photographs (he has amassed a photographic library of thousands), design jewelry (he’s created more than 500 original designs, some winning national and international awards), make a film (he’s made several) or write scripts (too numerous to count); it seems he is a Renaissance man of all things creative.

“Art is a miracle,” says Boris, near the end of our four-hour visit, and I completely concur. This miracle has brought a man thousands of miles across the ocean, has saved a little girl, has created connections, built buildings, stirred up emotions, made people hear the soulfulness of jazz, and shown people the tenacity of the human spirit and the wonder and mystery of art. //

For more information on Boris Gorelik or to purchase some of his art, jewelry and photography, go to borisgorelik.com.