A Communal Palace Painting

For me as a painter, decorator and illustrator, art is the way and the methods to reflect, influence and transform the environment in order to make it more attractive and livable. The purpose of my art is to inspire viewers, generate and regenerate their spiritual energies with a dose of amazement and enchantment. The main subject of my creative activities is the urban environment as an embodiment of artificiality built on natural needs; as nature framed by culture; as a realm of diversity and variety; as a sanctuary to strangers; as an object of collective art. The bigger and more cosmopolitan the city, the more intricate a grotesque it represents. Following the elusive idiosyncrasy of New York City I combine a variety of techniques and materials and different art forms. I use metallic mediums and decorative stuccoes. I incorporate frames into pictures, therefore many of my art pieces consist of exterior and interior parts, both sometimes of equal importance. Being a figurative artist, I love to create artificial mise-en-scenes and grotesque combinations using portraits of the real people I meet in the city. Inclusion of these people into my art makes them very special to me, this is why their portraits tend to resemble icons at times. I aestheticize the unavoidable inferiorities of megalopolises by including them too. I rhapsodize solitude as a part of the culture of togetherness. But it is not my intention to adorn the real nature of the city. On the contrary, it fascinates me so much that I’m striving to render it in the raw. While receiving academic training and then working for many years as a decorator and a trompe l’oeil artist I’ve armed myself with intensive knowledge of different mediums and materials. I’ve been constantly examining their visual appropriateness for reflecting the contemporary urban environment. I’ve paid particular attention to ways of depicting the presence of light in all its manifestations. I use anything that intrigues, fascinates and stimulates me to intrigue, fascinate and stimulate the viewers. My art is not a revolutionary beam of light directing the viewers to the ideal world, but rather a plash of sunlight which defines the poetry and evanescence of the moment.