Biography
I began to draw since a very young age. My father and grandfather were artists, but not very successful, and it was a hard time. The collapse of the USSR, Perestroika. Change of government. My mother was scared and forbade me even to think about an artistic career, so in 2006 I entered the Faculty o...
I began to draw since a very young age. My father and grandfather were artists, but not very successful, and it was a hard time. The collapse of the USSR, Perestroika. Change of government. My mother was scared and forbade me even to think about an artistic career, so in 2006 I entered the Faculty of Philology at Moscow State Pedagogical University.
I quickly realized that I did not want to be a teacher, much less a philologist or linguist, and quite by chance I took a job at the Sand Drawing Studio in 2010. It is this place has reminded me that I like to draw most of all. My duties included working with children and adults, teaching them how to draw with sand, and training staff for other studios. But my main occupation was creating sand shows and performing them in front of the public at various events. Two years later we created a theater: the Theater of Live Animation. I was there as an artist, and decorator, and screenwriter, and gained tremendous experience. But the most important thing the sand gave me was a sense of form, a sense of light and shadow and defined my love of color, because sand itself lacks that. However, drawing with sand disappointed me. I wanted to develop it as an art form, but it is still far from high art because of its commercialization.
I finally realized this when I became a sand artist in a Cirque du Soleil show in the United States in 2013. I was forced to draw the same clip all the time, which I didn't even think of. I lost all interest in sand painting, but living in the US, I started painting a lot. Graphics and painting, collages, body art - I tried my hand at everything.
After returning to Russia, I mastered Photoshop and began to draw in it. My hobbies also included clothes. I sewed, decorated, embellished, corrected what I did not like, or added what I thought was missing. Clothing became my next love after painting. The way a few yards of fabric can enhance the beauty of any person fascinates me just as much as the people, their faces, their bodies, their movements. So I tried to combine it all on one sheet of paper. That's how collages began to be born, with which, in 2020, I first took part in an exhibition in Moscow at the "Here on Taganka Gallery". After a while I started to recreate people's faces with digital media and print them on different paper sizes.
These days I'm painting portraits more and more in digital format, but I often take on paint or create collages.
