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Life is unpredictable indeed... Having been born in USSR and having lived the most part of my life in St. Petersburg- the cultural capital of Russia- I couldn`t have imagined even in my wildest dreams I would be pursuing my passion for painting working under the bright blue sky of Cote-d-Azur. After my graduation from Theatre Academy, my career was deeply connected with theatre ,where I worked as a stage and costume designer in Don Quixote, Marriage of Figaro, Orpheus, Corsair, Dido and Aeneas... It was a business trip with Mariinsky Theatre that changed my life completely, I got to France, to Cote-d-Azur for the first time in my life and it was overwhelming...Sea, the beauty of landscapes, culture, language - everything (was just right for me) and now I live and paint here. The way I prefer to paint can be described as figurative as the forms and shapes are not less important for me than color, concept and substance. Music and Theatre are both my friends and teachers, they are realities that we both created by human imagination.That is why musical terminology serves as a source of great inspiration to me: rythms, rests, sfumatures, crescendo, duration and sometimes even components of a mathematical approach.) I am not trying to either bring plot elements into my paintings like in literature or simply copy reality, or be ingenious in my painting techniques. What I am looking for is metaphors, rhymes, the essence of the surroundings, I am looking for my own melody and I am trying my own voice... My bouquet is an harmony of sounds and scents, a musical chord, an ensemble. It is similar to music where a chord can be Major or Minor, incredibly loud or hardly heard, or sometimes even in discord . It is the harmony of sounds that creates feelings, mood, atmosphere and that is what I want to achieve in my "Bouquet" series. My bouquets look nearly abstract, however each of them has its own character, tonality and influences the space it is in. Still life with bottles is not still at all, it is my own theatre where I am both the director and a playwright, stage designer and and a composer and the bottles are my dutiful actors. Inside every actor there is this magical substance, beverage that differs by color, age, taste, traditions and history and even native land. I am willing to be attentive to my actors and give them freedom to be what they want to be. "Why don`t you paint flowers?" I was asked once. I considered this question to be a challenge as it might be extremely hard to avoid the platitude of the subject matter. However, one can observe and admire plants for hours, every single petal, every stem curve can be amazing and meditating. Being inspired by Japonese poetry and drawings, I see my works dedicated to flowers as visualized Haiku poems. |