"Watermelon morning" Painting

I am a Ukrainian-American contemporary visual artist based in the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Perception transforms the way we recognize and project meaning onto the world around us. In my artistic practice, I explore the relationship between human beings and nature, and how natural forms are transformed through memory, projection, symbolism, and cultural interpretation.

Working primarily in painting and mixed media, I move between abstraction and figuration, treating them not as fixed categories but as oscillating conditions of perception. Familiar imagery and abstract forms shift between object and body, image and presence, the tangible and the imagined.

I am particularly interested in the anthropomorphic nature of seeing—the human tendency to recognize ourselves in the world around us by projecting emotions, narratives, and identities onto forms that exist beyond us. Through this process, painting becomes less a form of representation and more a way of revealing how meaning itself is constructed.

Optics plays a central role in my work. I create images within the space of the gaze—a space shaped by memory, association, bodily experience, and unstable perception. Repetition, variation, and subtle displacement allow ordinary imagery to move beyond stable definition, creating visual situations in which fluid identities and shifting meanings can emerge.

My work is also rooted in an ongoing reflection on the reciprocal relationship between humans and nature: how deeply human creativity, culture, and systems of meaning are shaped by natural forms, while simultaneously transforming them through interpretation and intervention. I am interested in the fragile balance between intimacy and alienation, creation and destruction, recognition and distortion.

Rather than offering fixed interpretations, my work remains open, existing in constant oscillation between abstraction and figuration, materiality and illusion, familiarity and ambiguity.