About me My paintings started as a personal salvation at a time when business troubles were slowly driving me mad. What began as an escape from reality turned into fascination with it. There is so much beauty in every face, in every leaf, in every ray of light that I had never actually seen before. I did not have any formal art education, so teaching myself to draw and to truly see is an everyday task. I went from pastels to ink on Clayboard and then to acrylics, striving not for the perfection, but for that effortless and random brushstroke that is life. I grew up by the ocean in a Russian port city. The city hugs the hills at the end of the earth between the sea and the sky in ever-changing hues of blue. Blue, the color of promise, of new hope, became my favorite color when I turned to acrylics. Credo I can not write like this, but I can live like this: "Everything as if it had never happened... It is a day in September, and when we come up into the light again out of the gloomy and not at all cool tombs, we blink, so bright is the day; I see the red clods of the ploughed field above the tombs, far-off and dark the autumn sea, midday, everything is the present, wind in the dusty thistles, I hear the notes of the flute, those are not Etruscan flutes in the tombs, however, but the wind in the wires, under the flickering shade of an olive tree stands my car gray with dust and burning hot, snake-heat in spite of the wind, but once more September: but the present, and we sit at a table in the shade and eat bread, until the fish has been grilled, I reach out with my hand for the bottle, to test whether the wine (Verdicchio) is also cold, thirst, then hunger, life appeals to me" Max Frisch "Hantenbain"