I was born in Chita Oblast (Transbaikalia) in 1963 in the family of a ‘hereditary’ physician. Our family traveled a lot, moved from a place to a place many times, which provided me with a lot of impressions. I started drawing as soon as I learnt to hold a pencil in my hands. But I still had to walk a long and uneasy way to convert my childish assays into the works of a full-fledged painter.

I passed my childhood in Ostashkov, a small town located on the Seliger lakeside, in an inimitably beautiful and touching environment, which really laid the foundation of my mindset. Yet, with no base for further education, I had difficulty realizing what my mission was. Like many of my peers, I wanted to become an “astronaut”. What only my imagined “astronaut” wasn’t: an orientalist, an ethnographer, a philatelist, but it was only a paint case that always accompanied me in all of my fancies. However, nobody cared about that, nor I myself did. “Painter is not a profession”, that was my family’s approach. Paying a tribute to the family tradition, on finishing my general school education, I entered a medical school. Real life turned out to be different from the sublime ideas I began with, and shortly before the graduation I left the school.

Meanwhile, dreams and reality eventually diverged altogether and went to two different dimensions. Still, I had to fit in real life, and my fate was to be determined by a coin. I threw it and asked if I should go to the Central Asia or the Urals? So I happened to go to Nizhny Tagil and stay in the home of Ivan Yakovlevich Bogolyubov. The father of this famous Ural family was a sculptor, president of the Painters Union, a mountain-like man, who looked like a grave Karabas-Barabas, but had an extremely subtle soul and open heart. It was him who recognized a painter in me (painting was their family profession). Under his guidance I got my first professional education, “artistic painting on metal”. As a graduation work, we selected three portraits of Tagil inventors. The Urals forever remained in my mind magnificent and “glamorous”: multiground blue horizons, “space” winter and nice, sympathetic people. How much they matter for me! People are the fortune that has been accompanying me in my creative life up to now. At the Urals I started working by cycles, creating painting series. I keep returning to many of those nowadays: “Divine Beings”, “Dances In The White”, “Music At Sunrise”. In decorative art I have developed the series “Snow-covered Umbrellas”.

Thus, I returned to Saint Petersburg not as an “astronaut”, but a painter by all of my formation. With the passage of time I graduated from the Fine Arts Faculty of the Herzen Russian State Pedagogic University. Even not a follower of the realistic school, I think that the basic skills should be mastered by everyone. Besides education, which by no way is evidence of the painting quality, a painter, in my opinion, must be super-diligent, creatively independent and tactful with respect to a viewer. Furthermore, only combined with the most profound sincerity a work can get a life and be presented to the viewer. Because art can change the world. “If we are responsible for every word we say, so we are responsible twice when creating an image”.  This precept is priceless for me. The times we live in force to defend one’s creative independence. Painting always suffers and ails together with the society. Even esthetics surrenders. Do painters themselves really not see that, for example, necrorealism and things like that are “viruses” which are leading the art to decay?! I wish I could close my eyes and stay inside myself… But, nolens volens, a painter is a social being. Art must be saved!

Again I was in a dimension impossible for me. What should I do now? Five-copeck coins are no longer in use. I had to resort to the delicate practice – thinking. I am confident that the mission of a painter is to find and build the beauty of the spiritual, material, entire space accessible to his / her inherent nature, the beauty without which he / she cannot imagine his / her existence. Otherwise, what is the difference from a commercial painter oriented to the philistine tastes? The painter is, first of all, devotion. With feelings like that I came to learn icon painting. The most perfect and profound Byzantine art is, in my opinion, the source that can heal the present-day artistic world from the pandemia. For me, that is the school of all schools, the true education that forms a skill with an emphasis on the credo, not to the contrary. I found exceptional goodwill there – not the ambitious style of teaching we developed immunity to while studying in our universities. And the remarkable tutors: I was lucky to learn from I. Mironovich, N. Telpis, A. Gennik, A. Karagina and E. Davydenko et al. What an extraordinary power had gathered so many geniuses in a place? I would like to express my acknowledgement of their classes in my works, for painting can do everything!

The problem of decaying esthetics was solved for me this way, even if in the framework of an individual’s work. Once again I’ve got evidence that life is a great miracle!

2013
Council of Europe, Strasbourg, France

2012
Johvi City Gallery, Johvi, Estonia

2012
Ostashkov Regional Studies Museum, Tver region

2011
Kazakhstan Artists Union

2009
Ostashkov, Russia

2008
I. Brodsky museum, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

2008
Art Museum, Severomorsk, Russia

2007
Regional Art Museum, Murmansk, Russia

2007
Centre for Development of Traditional Arts, Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia, Russia

2007
“Bank Saint-Petersburg”, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

2006
Centre for Development of Traditional Arts, Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia, Russia

2004


2004
Gallery “Rosvuzdesign”, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

2003
Head of the Republic of Karelia Administration, Petrozavodsk, Republic of Karelia, Russia

2001
Exhibition hall of Nizhniy Tagil Iron and Steel Works, Nizhniy Tagil, Russia

2000
Gallery “Pihla”, Helsinki, Finland

2000
Gallery “Palitra (Palette)”, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

2000


1999
F. Dostoevsky museum, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

1999
Private office, Bremen, Germany

1999
“Russian Club”, Hamburg, Germany

1998
“Mercedes-Benz”, Kiel, Germany

1996
F. Dostoevsky museum, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

1996
City library, Ostashkov, Russia

Awards

2010
ArtPreview 2010 winner

2010
Diploma of St.Petersburg

2010
1-st Diploma of Russian Art Week