Nicola Blazev was born in Orehovo, Bulgaria in 1913.  Throughout his youth Blazev sketched and painted constantly.  He took part in a national competition that won him a complete five year scholarship to the Bulgarian Academy of Fine Arts, from which he graduated with highest honors.

After graduation Blazev remained in Sofia, Bulgaria painting the citizens and the diplomatic community of the capital city until he was drafted into the army in World War II.  Throughout the war he was an illustrator in the trenches.  After the war artistic freedom came to an end in Bulgaria, which had become a Russian Satellite.  The state prescribed not only the subject of each painting, but its style, dimension, and the amount of time the artist was to spend on it.  After producing a seemingly unending series of portraits of Stalin, Marx and Engels, Nicola Blazev escaped into Yugoslavia in 1948.

In Yugoslavia, Blazev and other artists from Stalinist regimes enjoyed relative freedom for their work until the diplomatic rapprochement between Tito and Krushchev in 1954 forced him into another escape.  This time with his five year old daughter, Angelka, into Italy, where they lived and he painted for five years in a refugee camp near Trieste.

Nicola and Angelka finally arrived in New York City in 1959.  Blazev painted quite successfully there for the next six years.  In 1965 he opened his summer gallery in Rockport, MA dividing his time and energies between the two for the next nine years.  1974 Blazev realized one of his lifelong dreams; he went to Paris and painted an amazing series of thirty-nine paintings in ten days.

Cancer took Blazev's life in October of 1974, a few months after his return from Paris.  His artwork is known in several countries throughout the world, a legacy relatively few artists leave behind.