Dog Painting

Hi, my name is Konstantin, I live and work in Russia, in St. Petersburg. I started drawing at the age of 16, then I realized that this was my vocation. But they didn’t take me to the Academy of Arts, so I entered the Higher School of Management. My parents really wanted me to become an economist and work in a large company. I graduated from the university and realized that apart from connections in elite circles, among the children of wealthy parents, I received nothing. I was empty. I had to start over again, a career as an artist. I'm self-taught. At the age of 12, I was not accepted to art school, I had to learn to paint myself. When I turned 18 I entered an art school and studied there with children, they were 10 years younger than me. It was weird. But I painted all my life, as a child I had heart problems and I was in hospitals, I saw people die and saw how they were brought broken to the intensive care unit. You lie down talking to a person, and the next day his bed is empty. It laid fingerprints on me, my memory remembered such moments. An artist is a life experience. This is probably why I paint wrecked cars as an allegory to the fact that everything does not last forever and everything will break down someday. I like the theme of metal destruction in cars, I am the first who began to paint pictures on a similar theme. After university, my parent was given a job for me in a prestigious company, in government service, this is a large energy company in Russia. I worked there for a year and left, everyone was in shock, I went into the unknown, I donated everything for the sake of painting. There is no turning back. In 2008, I opened my debut exhibition at the Globus Gallery on the top floor of the plant. The exhibition was called Zero Stopping Distance, and I put all my energy into it. I exhibited paintings with broken foreign cars, as a response to the era of consumption, the fact that all values, even very expensive ones, can be broken, everything can be lost in one moment. These were the happy years of the reign of President Dmitry Medvedev. Russia then lived very richly, it seemed a hundred years of repression, oppression, the crime of the 90s behind, the time of prosperity has come, everything that Russia was going to was embodied in these 5 years. The exhibition coincided with the war with Georgia, we have successfully won, the enemy has been defeated, the ratings are going through the roof. High oil, oligarchs and wealth.