Black and White Tranquility: A Snowy Nagano Painting

I was born in Tbilisi (Georgia) and lived in Moscow (Russia). In the early 2000s I came to Japan, where I spent about 10 years studying Japanese art, particularly, sumi-e ink painting. This style, rooted in Zen Buddhism, fascinated me with its expressive lines and abundance of empty space. It took me years to learn how to express my inner life energy with a brush. Inks applied to rice paper cannot be corrected. It means that a single mistake destroys the whole picture, and you have to start from scratch. I do not follow classical sumi-e. Instead, I combine sumi-e with Western art to adapt the Eastern spirit for the Western viewer. My main themes are flowers, birds and landscapes. I put on paper their images created in my imagination. I make my paintings using authentic Japanese and Chinese materials and tools, such as rice paper, (Xuan, Gasenshi, Washi mulberry paper), Japanese black ink, Japanese watercolor (gansai), and special long-haired brushes. I strive to show the beauty of ink shades, the visual effects of its spreading on the paper and create a "picture of the heart" that felt like poetry.