Artist Statement
I am a Plein Air watercolor artist who believes in the painting’s ability to communicate, without words, all the beauty that surrounds us in our natural world. Traveling in order to paint on location is critical for my art: it helps me build a lasting relationship with the place and its people, feel its life energy, and capture its essence. I believe that through its visual impact, a painting should reflect the artist’s passion for his or her work.
My love for landscape painting developed early in childhood and has been growing over the course of my lifetime. I began studying Fine Arts in 1972 while attending a specialized Art school in my home town of Krasnodar, Russia. In 1985, several years after graduating from the Pospolitaki Art College( 1979), I moved to the Arctic community of Provideniya, Chukotka, and established the Fine Arts Studio on the Russian Far East. Over the course of the next decade I traveled extensively through the Russian coast of the Bering Strait, visiting Native Yupik and Chukchi communities, collaborating with local artists, completing State-funded commissions for public art, and celebrating the magnificent vastness of my new tundra home through Plein Air painting.
With the gradual dissipation of the Cold War atmosphere in the Bering Strait, beginning1991, I was able to regularly participate in the Ice Alaska’s International Ice Art Championships held annually in Fairbanks, Alaska. Immersion into a different medium which, on its technical side, requires precise understanding of the relationships between elements and natural forces has enriched my painting with more accurate lighting qualities and greater three-dimensional depth. Since 1996, Alaska has been my permanent residence, where I live and work as a painter, ice sculptor, and art instructor. Drawing inspiration from the geographical and cultural continuities between Alaska and the Russian Far East, I strive to continue celebrating, through painting, the lavish majesty of the Northern Splendor.