My creations are on the border between painting and sculpture. The recurring element in my current works is nails. They may be regular and square, antique and rusty, but mainly I use my own hand-forged square nails. These most mundane objects are extremely expressive because of their physicality and the profound associations reaching back into human history. The roughness, resilience and raw beauty of the hand-forged nails connect me with my background of growing up in the Soviet Siberia.

Each of my paintings starts with a strong urge to express a feeling or idea. It may take weeks until a visual concept forms in my mind. Then I find qualified materials that can range from paper and wood to fleece and eggshells. The image evolves until the original feeling appears in the painting.

I grew up in Siberia, studied in Prague and now reside in San Francisco.