Painting adorns our lives and makes them more vibrant. With the help of artwork, any interior can be transformed and given a certain mood. Any idea or dream can be made tangible, real, and attainable — it’s almost like magic.
I truly love the very process of creating a painting. The feeling of immersing yourself in art, in creativity, is incomparable; it’s a special world where time moves differently, where there are no boundaries of time or space.
I understand that looking at pictures is easier than reading text, and long words can frustrate some people, but I promise I’ll try to be as brief as possible. You’re getting to know me and my world, so I need to explain how I ended up here, what paths led me to this point, and why I do what I do.
Painting has always seemed like magic to me. When I was a child, I found a portrait of a girl drawn in pencil among my mother’s papers in a cupboard. I could see and understand that it was just lines on paper, traces of a pencil — yet from the sheet a living face was looking at me, with a gaze that held a question, a mystery I felt I ought to solve but couldn’t.
Since then, I began trying to draw people’s faces. In school, I would secretly sketch my classmates and teachers under the desk in my notebook. The portrait genre attracted me with its complexity far more than drawing ordinary objects. Over time, making portraits of friends became a familiar routine. Whatever I happened to be doing in life, drawing was always with me. Even when my hands were busy with something else, masterpieces were forming in my mind — masterpieces worthy of the greatest museums in the world. Over many years, an entire gallery of works has accumulated there, all waiting to be brought to life.
The difficulty was that large projects required a lot of space and time — and I had neither. I had to survive the harsh realities of the 1990s in Russia, and I couldn’t follow the traditional path of an artist: academy, exhibitions, publications. But I could paint portraits whenever I managed to steal a moment. And that’s exactly what I did.
The joy and appreciation of the people I portrayed became a powerful motivation and a source of confidence in my abilities.
Many of the portraits didn’t survive, because I had traveled many roads, and there was no way to capture images with a phone the way we can now. Almost all of my works went to clients, and I was left with nothing but empty canvases. I thought about exhibitions, but I had nothing to show.
Only in recent years, for various reasons, have my works — and photographs of them — begun to accumulate. Some of the pieces I’ve created recently you can see below:
As you can see, these are mostly portraits. This genre remains one of the most challenging in painting. The main reason is that a portrait requires likeness, and not every artist can achieve that. It demands incredible effort and precision, which is why many prefer easier work and choose other directions in art.
My portraits look like living people and are filled with the energy of real human beings. Almost everyone who has seen my works up close has said this, and I consider their words a high compliment to what I do. My portraits are held in private collections around the world, and people take pride in owning such valuable works of art. What exactly they say, you can read on a separate page (Read the reviews).
One of my pieces — the portrait of Tita and Gustaf Serlachius — is part of the collection at the Gösta Museum in Finland.
The fact that I mostly paint portraits doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to create large-scale genre paintings. As I’ve already said, throughout my life countless works have been conceived and “painted” in my mind — a whole gallery of paintings waiting to be materialized. They are simply waiting for me to figure out how to earn enough money for a studio, which I still don’t have.
ChatGPT сказал:
There are countless foundations and professional unions, as well as galleries and art dealers, that help artists — but my situation is unique. I’ve faced 25 years of rejections from every institution connected with painting.
First of all, there is the Artists’ Union of Finland, Matrikkeli — a media resource for Finnish artists, Taiko — a platform for selling artwork, Tekes, which distributes support among artists, and foundations like the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation. Year after year, I receive dozens of refusals with phrases like: “No one selected you,” “Talent isn’t enough,” “We don’t have the resources to justify our decisions.”
They have the resources to charge a fee for processing an application, but apparently no resources to explain a rejection.
But I take all of this quite calmly. Without these rejections, I might not have become the person I am today. I continue to work and grow in my own direction, within the possibilities available to me.
I believe that an artist can succeed even without formal or “mandatory” institutions, and can earn the love and respect of people through what he creates with his own hands — not thanks to the patronage of certain groups or individuals.