MY STORY

I grew up in a Moscow communal apartment. Six different families were stuck together sharing one bathroom, one toilet and one kitchen. The long corridors were dark and scary. The rooms were small but bright with tall windows. To this day I carry the combination of darkness and light inside me. Watching the families interacting with each other, I witnessed love, friendship, scandals, and dark secrets. 

I did not have my own room. I was always surrounded by people. But when I sat down to draw pictures at our dining table, I was not bothered by anyone. I was born with the hand of a draftsman. I drew multi-figure compositions and horses. And I could not understand why others were unable to do what came so naturally to me. Drawing never felt like an effort. I took my gift for granted. My skill was no big deal. It appeared there were more important things in life. I produced drawings and did not look at them later. They were a throw away thing. All my childhood drawings disappeared. Once I saw the boys running around the yard with albums of my drawings that they had found in a dumpster. It took me years to learn that art is valuable, that sharing it via a dumpster is not the best marketing strategy.

My childhood hero was the Danish cartoonist Herluf Bidstrup, who was popular in Soviet Russia for his love of communism. I also drew cartoons and illustrations of how people interact with each other in my imaginary stories.

I graduated from Moscow Institute of Architecture, an excellent academic school with a strong emphasis on classical drawing, rendering, and composition. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who could draw. Half way through college, I knew that the classical art alone was not enough for me. A large exhibition of a Norwegian artist Edward Munch woke me up to the limitations of academic drawing. Munch warped reality to serve his emotional landscape instead of showing off his skilled hand. Later I discovered Chaim Soutine and many other 20th century artists whose visual language served to share and communicate, instead of trying to impress or indoctrinate. I began the lifelong search for my own visual language to match my own inner reality.

I’ve always felt a lot of energy inside. It naturally poured out in expressive gestural lines and bright colors. I have also had periods when I was interested in studying the dark recesses of the human psyche.  (Courtesy of reading Russian novels, existentialist philosophers, and the warped living of an authoritarian society.)    

I immigrated to the United States at the age of 26. By then I had my MA in Architecture, served two years in the Red Army, and worked for a year on a prestigious architectural team winning several national design awards.

In America, I wanted to start a new life as a full-time artist. But starting that “new life” took more than two decades of vacillating between architecture and painting. It was not so much that architecture paid better. I could not figure out what to do with my art in the quantities I produced even in evenings and weekends. The call of the dumpster as my main marketing tool stayed strong.

There were signs around me that my art was needed. What a surprise it was when a friend of a friend purchased a very large drawing of mine paying what seemed like a fortune at the time. Friends and acquaintances bought more of my artworks. Some of them were not wealthy people, but they came up with the money. They got something from my art. Even those boys back in Moscow who got my drawings out of the dumpster knew what was good. They refused to part with the drawings. They did not believe that one of them (me) produced them. 

After I turned forty, I had the growing awareness that quitting my art was not an option. The main question became how much time to give it. Over a period of several years, with the support of my beautiful wife and the closest friends, I slowly shed off my architectural career and gave my full attention to art.

***

When I quit architecture, I went into a period of unreserved expression. I even did public performances, converting the nervous energy of the stage fright into the energy of mark making, mostly abstract.  A few years later, I felt nostalgic for the tradition at the roots of my culture. I also did not want my art to become a simple emotional discharge. I wanted to work towards esthetic experiences. I began starting my day in the studio with a drawing paraphrase on an old master’s painting even while practicing the abstract art. Eventually, I could not help but turning one of those paraphrases into a large figurative painting, which started a new series based on an ongoing dialogue with the old masters. The Renaissance artists were looking at Hellenistic artists. And I in turn now look at Renaissance Art.

I use acrylic instead of oil, which is sort of a prank. I poke at the masters instead of worshiping them, which certainly would not be allowed in my school. The images are rendered traditionally, but there is mischief in them. The most obvious one is the presence of whimsical cartoon-like characters. They found their way into my first two paintings and I liked them there. They were not conceived consciously. They grew naturally out of my modern life experience and the process of composing the picture. Later I learned that the mysterious image migration between cultures was studied by a brilliant, but not very well-known cultural theorist, Aby Warburg. He investigated how “the unconscious memory holds mysterious imagery of civilization’s uncivilized pagan past”. The idea spoke to me and I continued fishing the fantastical creatures out of my unconscious mind to include into the otherwise traditional subjects. My subjects are mostly Legends and Myths of the past as rendered by Renaissance and Baroque painters.

I present classical art through the prism of a modern eye. I simplify composition to make it more palatable for our short attention span. I make it cinematic to compete with TV monitors. I make some areas look like an amateur photoshop user tried to edit it, but ended up with a few accidents. My architectural background will not let me build random pictures without an underlying structure. The human anatomy is never warped without a reason. Any distortion serves to move energy around the picture plane in a constructive and entertaining way.

Somebody commented that he feels aggression even in my humorous compositions. I accept that. How can it be otherwise at the fractured time that we live in. Even if there is some aggression present in my paintings, they still remind us to lighten up, to humor each other and ourselves, as well as the personages of the past. As I have discovered for myself, life deprived of playing is only a half-life. Back in Soviet High School, I was thrown out of the class a few times for some pranks and jokes. But I noticed that the teachers while throwing me out were suppressing their laughter. They were doing the proscribed thing on the outside, while enjoying the entertainment on the inside. That was the essence of surviving the totalitarian regime. My mom, no matter how difficult life was, was always ready to laugh at my jokes. Humor was sort of a peacemaker. I like affecting people in a positive way, contributing to their well-being by catching their attention and firing up their imagination.