How I Got Involved in the Art of Leonid Afremov

Hi, my name is Boris, and I’m the youngest son of the artist Leonid Afremov. I’d like to share my personal story with my father’s art and the brand that grew around it.

I am seven years younger than my brother David. He was the one who first helped my father build the business in Israel in the early 1990s. David assisted with street fairs, club exhibitions, and door-to-door sales. I still remember both of them constantly hustling — my father painting during the day and my brother selling in the evenings.

At that time, door-to-door sales in Israel were doing very well. Many recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union were moving into newly built homes and needed artwork and decorations. I used to help them prepare the bags of paintings at home before they headed out. Eventually, the operation outgrew our three-bedroom apartment, so my father decided to open a gallery and frame shop. He named it Lapid, which means “torch” in Hebrew.

When my brother was drafted into the military, my father ran the gallery alone. I was eleven years old at the time. By the time I turned thirteen, I began helping out after school — mostly with cleaning and small tasks. When my father organized exhibitions, he would print promotional flyers, and I would recruit my friends to distribute them around town and place them in mailboxes. After one successful exhibition, he rewarded me with a new electric guitar and guitar lessons.

During this period, my father befriended the jazz musician Leonid Ptashka. He first visited the gallery to order a portrait for a friend. My father, who loved jazz, ended up painting many jazz musicians. This friendship opened doors to exhibitions during jazz concerts and festivals, bringing both positive attention and controversy.

In 2000, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Ashdod took offense that a Jewish artist was painting African-American jazz icons, nudes, and humorous scenes of old Russian Jews. They began stalking our family, showed up at our apartment, urinated on the front door, and smashed our car windshield. We had to call the police multiple times. Because most of them didn’t drive, they initially couldn’t follow my father to the gallery. Once they discovered its location, they vandalized it — urinating on paintings, smashing windows, and destroying framing equipment.

Although the physical damage could have been repaired, the incident deeply affected my father. He felt his artistic freedom had been violated. He chose not to reopen the gallery and largely stopped doing exhibitions in Israel. He only continued working with a couple of galleries in Jaffa and Jerusalem, preferring to paint from home. During this time, I was busy finishing high school and playing in the band Soul Enema. Years later, while studying film in Florida, I made a documentary about this story.

Back then, my father didn’t know how to use a computer. We had a PC at home that I used for school and gaming, and it was connected to the internet. One day, I searched for “Leonid Afremov” online and discovered several websites — some in Israel and others in the USA. I was shocked to see paintings that had been sold in Israel for around $150 listed on American gallery sites for over $5,000. When I showed this to my father, he immediately said we needed to go to the United States. He saw that artists there had far more freedom and could earn significantly better money. That discovery sparked our plans to move.

He painted hundreds of works and shipped them to his sister in New York. In December 2001, my father and brother traveled to New York, visiting galleries one by one. They sold some paintings, but the terms were poor — mostly 50/50 consignment with no upfront payment or very low buyout prices ($100–$200). I remained in Israel, finishing high school and playing guitar with Soul Enema.

My father found the New York winter too harsh, so he moved to Florida for a warmer climate similar to Israel. I joined him there in July 2002. In 2003, a friend at school bought a guitar on eBay, and I became fascinated by the platform. I quickly set up the eBay profile vitebskfineart for my father. That marked the real beginning of my involvement in the Afremov business.

Since I was the most computer-savvy person in the family, I handled all the listings, shipping, and customer service for our eBay store. Later, this expanded to managing afremov.com. One of our early eBay customers later told us he had bought a painting in a Boca Raton gallery for $12,000 before we were online. The gallery had taken it on consignment, paid us only $1,000, and claimed they sold it for $2,000. We had proof of the real sale price. When we confronted them (I translated), they produced a fake receipt. My father was deeply upset but chose not to escalate legally. From that moment on, he refused consignment deals — galleries had to buy the paintings outright.

This incident pushed me to become much more involved in our online sales. Today, I consider myself a 23-year veteran of e-commerce. I never studied sales or marketing in college — I majored in Television and Film Production with a minor in Music. Everything I know, I learned through trial and error, research, and hands-on experience. While helping build the online business and continuing my studies, I also played in the band Spread the Dub.

Then we moved to Mexico… but that’s a story for another time.